The Sacred Hunt Duology (118 page)

The creature's large eyes narrowed into edges. “Well met,” he said, almost pleased.

But there was no wildness to Meralonne, no exultation. He was pale—although he was always pale—and his eyes were the color of steel. “Evayne,” he said softly, “tell the mages to use spells of defense—and only those spells.”

“But—”

“Do it.”
He stepped forward.

“You are already too late,” the creature said, stepping farther into the hall.

“If we were too late, we would face the God and not the lackey,” the mage replied.

The words cut the smile from the demon's long mouth. “You will wish, before this is over, that you had.” His fire shot out like a whip, flaying the surface of rock and dirt. Where it struck, the rock grew red and white—above the heads of the army that waited at Meralonne's back.

Meralonne's magical shield-wall had given the war-mages the time they needed to react to the attack; molten rock dripped down in a glow of angry heat, and stopped in midair, congealing upon the invisible barrier hastily erected against it.

“You will wish it,” Meralonne replied through gritted teeth. “Your lord is not known to suffer failure gladly.”

“You are beginning to bore me.”

Fire.

• • •

Strike and counter, strike and parry, strike and miss. The demon's sword cut a deep gouge in the face of the solid stone wall; the act did not slow his blade at all.

Perhaps the others did not note it; perhaps they did—but Kallandras was trained to observe in just such a manner. The demon's height gave him the advantage, as did his weight; the size differential did not slow him. Curious that; he would have expected Meralonne to last scant seconds against such an opponent.

But the silver-haired, slender mage, with no obvious spell and no obvious defense, gave ground slowly and grudgingly. Ah. That was close. The ground thundered with the blow of the demon's sword; shivered with the touch of his fire. Kallandras looked up at the crack that had appeared in the abutment. They could not stand here for much longer. The mages did not have the power to deny the demon's attacks.

“Evayne,” he shouted; she turned, the edges of her cloak swirling wildly. She was the older Evayne; the woman of confidence and mystery. But he saw the fear in her eyes as they met his; the uncertainty shook him. Still, he lifted his hands to his mouth to mimic the call of the horn.

She knew which horn he referred to. “Not yet,” she said through clenched teeth. “Too early, and we have come this far for nothing.”

“We cannot—” He stopped at the sound of a terrible cracking, and swung round in time to see the shield of Meralonne APhaniel splintering into shards of cold light. The mage's cry reverberated throughout the sudden silence in the hall.

The demon's smile was a chill and terrible thing.

• • •

There were archers among the Kings' Defenders; they were assembled in haste and brought forward along the tunnel's width. But they were few, almost an afterthought to the battle plan, and not a conscious tactic. The light was poor in the tunnels, and the ceilings not always so high. But the demon was a target of such size that only one new to the art could miss—and there were no fledgling archers here.

Arrows, steel tips balanced by perfectly designed flights, were nocked and aimed. King Cormalyn, against the urgings of his brother, saw fit to test a single arrow's flight before giving the order to let fly.

So it was that he lost a single archer, and not the group—for the arrow turned in flight to find its target at the center of the Defender's eye. The archers were commanded to stand down in a silence heavy with uncertainty.

A Duke of the Hells gave them laughter in return for the offered death.

• • •

Fire ruffled the earth, transforming everything about it. Meralonne raised his blade against its onslaught, but without his shield it seemed clear that he had no defense. Clear, at least, to Kallandras.

He was no loremaster, to understand the niceties and subtleties of what he saw—but he was a bard, and the bardic colleges were built upon songs that were ancient before he first drew breath. The shield was riven, the fire stronger for it.

Can you wield the wild magics?
Meralonne had asked.

But he had asked Evayne. Evayne's answer was not Kallandras'.

We need you
, he told himself, meaning his trapped brothers and he. In the darkness, he raised his arm and called. Searing in the shadows and the dim light, the answer came: the ring upon his left hand flashed, illuminating him. He spoke to air, and air answered, pulling at captive curls and tugging at the seams of his dark clothing—an invitation to play, or worse. Pointing, he spoke again. To fire went wind, and around it laid its binding.

Kallandras' will was strong, but the demon lord was in his element. The fire banked but did not gutter.

• • •

Gilliam could see the fighting clearly because of the light the magical fire and ice shed in the hall itself. He could hear the grunts of the mages who kept the army protected, could hear the whispered, desperate prayers of the Priests, and the murmuring of the Exalted. That murmur was the only strong sound in the room, and it spread, growing louder and stronger in the saying.

The demon lord looked up as the darkness surrounding the army gave way to a golden light. His smile, if anything, grew broader. “Summer magic. How quaint. But you face no mere Winter.”

“No? We faced one of the
Kialli
, and he fell, taking only a handful with him.” Meralonne rose from his crouch; his shield arm dangled awkwardly at his side, but he did not favor it or attempt to protect it. The Summer magics seemed to strengthen him, if they did not weaken his foe.

“You did not face one of the Ducal Lords,” was the cold reply. “I do not know why you chose to interfere in this battle—but for you, it no longer matters.”

Meralonne opened his lips to shout a warning as the fires grew wild and uncontrolled. All that left him was a scream.

At his back, three of the Astari were ash in mere seconds, their armor and their swords a stream of smoking, white liquid.

Gilliam started forward, whether to aid or to flee even he was not certain. At his side, Ashfel growled; he brought a hand to the dog's head and held it there a moment, steadying both himself and his pack leader. His pack. Fingers white where they gripped the Hunter's Spear, he stared into the darkness, fumbling at his side. Evayne told him that he would
know
the right moment to make the call.
He'd missed it; he must have, but he'd make up for it now. His hands found the small, smooth Hunter's Horn.

Espere stopped him, her hand on his. Even here, it was hard to be touched by her.

Her eyes, he saw, were very golden and in the darkness almost luminescent. She opened her lips quietly; he thought she might whimper or growl. Instead, she spoke.

“Set me free.”

He stared at her as if the words were incomprehensible.

“Lord,” she said, tightening the grip she had kept on his hand. “Set me free.”

He could not speak. He felt her anxiety, saw his expression through her eyes; he knew that she was afraid of what she asked.

“I would stay with you,” she told him. “But if we are to fight, we must be equal—and we must be separate. Please.”

He didn't even know how to do what she asked; the Hunter Lords built their invisible and necessary bonds, but only death broke them. And yet . . . her fear was not for him, and not for herself; it was an unnamed fear. Her fingers were curved and hard; he pulled his hand free of them and stepped back. Took a look at her, from the outside, as he would have to do with no Hunter's bond to guide him.

He was lying to himself; he knew how to let her go. He could feel the stretch and stress of the bond between them, for it was thinner than that which bound Ashfel to him. And he had made it so, distancing himself from Espere, this strange, half-human creature, this daughter of Stephen's killer, this—
say
it, Gil
—the only woman for whom he had ever felt such a visceral desire.

Set me free.

He had distanced himself, but never completely.

The smell of charred flesh was carried down the tunnel by the howl of an unexpected wind; he froze in its chill and turned. She turned as well, and he saw the creature—the demon lord—through her eyes. But it was not as a human that she looked, not as a human that she saw.

Swallowing, closing his eyes a moment against her, and seeking instead the waist-high vantage of Ashfel, he cut her free, as cleanly and as quickly as possible.

It didn't hurt nearly as much as he had once feared it might—but it left an emptiness. She filled it with surprise, with wonder, and with a little fear. Because, the moment she was lost to him, she found a different anchor.

Espere began to
change
.

• • •

Stephen had told him about the first change. But Stephen's words were thin and weak compared to the reality of the child of the Hunter's Death. Her arms sank to the shaking earth, and her knees; her head she bowed down to her chest as she
began a guttural keening that grew lower and louder and lower still. What had once been skin became harder and took on a sheen of reflective gold. Scales, he thought. He stepped back, to make room for her.

“Don't panic!” someone shouted. “She's one of ours!” He did not know for certain, but he thought the voice Evayne's.

Her face was the last to change, but if you looked upon her eyes, it was not so disturbing as all that. Yes, her jaws thinned and stretched, her teeth grew sharper and longer, her neck became almost the length of his arm from fingertip to shoulder joint—but her eyes were still Espere's eyes. Only larger.

Was she taller than the demon? It was hard to tell. Was she longer? Her tail flicked up, tearing a chunk of the stone from the side of the wall.

She had no wings. There was no need for them. With a roar that shook the ceiling no less than the fires had done, she leaped.

• • •

From out of the darkness of the tunnels, gilded and shining with Summer heat, hope came. It howled in wordless rage, its teeth crashed shut on empty air, its tail struck ebony thigh. Where seconds before a demon the color of night's despair fought a slender, injured mage, he now faced the Hunter's scion: Bredan's daughter.

Kallandras froze a moment in wonder—something his training should never have allowed—before he saw his opening. Without a word or a backward glance, he took the only chance he had to reach Meralonne APhaniel's side. The mage was propped to near-standing in a crevice that his battle had made in the wall; he cradled his arm against his chest, although he did not drop or put up his sword.

“Meralonne,” the bard said softly.

The mage's eyes were slow to focus, and when they did, his slender features twisted in a bitter disappointment—as if, for a moment, he had expected to see another face, a different compatriot.

Kallandras said nothing, but offered him instead the use of a strong arm, a strong back—and a silence in which to gather the pain and bury it deeply.

“What a pair we make, we two,” the mage said softly, his voice carrying over the thunder of a battle of giants.

“Yes,” Kallandras replied. But his attention was focused upon other things: fire, falling rocks, the movement of stone plates beneath his feet. The mage was not, after all, a light or scant burden—but he was not immobile either, and together they reached the line of the waiting army. The Astari opened the ranks to let them through as if even they knew there was no danger in it. The battle was between the demon lord and the beast.

“Will it be enough?” Kallandras heard himself asking.

Meralonne grimaced. “I am no seer,” he said, clenching his teeth. “But the Oathbinder is very near, and while he is here, his half-blood child is in her element. I would not choose this battle.”

“Kallandras.”

The bard turned to see Devon ATerafin's pale face. “Take him to the healers.”

Wordlessly, Kallandras nodded; together they began to make their way down the eastern side of the hall.

• • •

But the bard stopped well short of the healers, seeking the shadows that fell between the radius of priestly lights.

Seeing this, understanding what it meant, Meralonne slumped against stone that was, for the moment, hard. “They cannot help me,” he said softly.

Kallandras nodded.

“The shield was riven.”

The bard again offered his silence. He had heard the cry that Meralonne gave as the shield splintered; had he not been watching, he might have mistaken it for a death cry. Might have. But he knew that Meralonne's death, when and if it came, would occasion no mortal cry.

The vision of the Kovaschaii was still sharp. What had divided them, unspoken, bound them together now in the silence.

“Bind my arm, and return me to the front.”

“They will know that the healers have not tended you.”

Meralonne's grimace was wry, and pained. “Yes, they'll know. And I'll give them the sharp edge of my tongue if they question me. Let the healer-born use their resources on the fallen they can help.” He fumbled in the darkness a moment, his smile growing less fragile as he saw the disapproval in Kallandras' expression.

In the midst of a battle that would decide their fate, and the fate of Averalaan, Meralonne APhaniel lifted a long-stemmed shallow pipe to his lips with his whole hand. The aroma of burning tobacco made of the towering halls a familiar place.

• • •

He did not know what she was feeling, did not know what she was seeing, could not taste or smell or hear the sounds of battle as she did. As her tail cut a swath through fire and air, as the ground once again shuddered and heaved beneath the blow of demon blade, he made his way toward the front line where people stood at the ready as if they were uncomfortable just watching, but had no other choice.