The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (78 page)

Then another horrid cry broke through the tumult; he never would have heard it over the noise except that it was just in front of Kai.  “Sylvar’s down!”

No, no, no.  Not Sylvar.

Kai still did not leave his post, twin blades biting into only what came tearing into them, and Loren, on his left side, was barely able to handle what was sneaking through.  At least he was helping, Ari thought in anguish, tugging helplessly at his tether. 

Then a long, lean body broke through the group of Tarq in front of him, forcing her way out with Sylvar
’s limp body over her shoulder.  The Dra Atlanta.  Ari felt a rush of warmth for her, which turned abruptly to nausea when he saw the flapping steak that had been Sylvar’s shoulder pass in front of his eyes.  She hung as limp as the Queen, fine, silky white hair soaked crimson on one side and hanging almost to Atlanta’s knees. Fleet to the end, the Dra sprinted through the thinning Tarq around the front of the Hall, leaping like a stag over the bodies in the way and throwing herself on the Triele.

Sorrow seemed to squeeze Ari in two, made worse by its meaninglessness.  Were they just giving up?  Fleeing to the new life Illians claimed waited them at death?  Distracting as the raging senselessness was, Ari was still alert enough to notice yet a new development.  Raemon was actually talking now.  He had been for several minutes, when he thought about it.  But when the two girls disappeared, his voice dipped abruptly—it came roaring back, more powerful and angrier than before, but it had definitely distracted him.

Next to him, Selah was
answering
the god…and Ari was beginning to feel like he wasn’t mentally competent enough to handle this.

The doors at the end of the Hall slammed shut and a feeble, raggedy cheer rose from the remaining Whiteblades.  Actually, the doors had been inched closed whenever a moment free of swords availed itself, Ari knew; it was the great iron bar that had been released to slam down into its holding slot that had caused the noise.  But it was one good thing in a whole lot of bad, and he was glad to have it.

He still couldn’t see what difference it made.  The whole Hall was one seething mass of anger and swords and furious motion, distorted by waves of heat, polluted by the smoke of a charnel house, and rank with the smell of fear.  Bodies, bladed, bloodied, and broken, littered the stone floor in piles, and still there were incomputable numbers assaulting the Whiteblades and the northerners.  He had thought he had this all-important role to play—now he doubted he or the Empress would survive long enough to see it through.

And then the inevitable happened.  A few Tarq got past the weak defense at the end of their little group.  Ari tensed as he caught sight of them scurrying around the end that Atlanta had been covering.  “Selah,” he whispered urgently, and raised his blade awkwardly.  He was no Dra with his right hand, with his left…

Worse, he came to the conclusion as he parried the first vigorous thrust that these small, nimble, cloth-covered types were better fighters than the big, noisy, naked, oiled ones.  They were quick, and though he noticed their blades gave under his, they were still steel and would still puncture through his increasingly fragile-seeming skin.  He parried and thrust desperately, with no time to remember what he’d learned from Banion all those long weeks on the trail.  Were it not for the fact that his space was so narrow, here next to the wall, he would have been overrun already—he was that slow.  The couple quick sword strokes to dispatch a man and then move on to the next—that only happened in stories and to Drae, he was convinced.  It was taking every ounce of his concentration just to keep that orangeish blade from cutting his throat.

Things went from bad to worse.  The liquid flow of people around him (including everyone but Selah, who had him tethered like a hound) shifted to allow another Tarq in next to the original and Ari felt cold fear slide like a blade down his back.  If he got to Selah…Frantically, he tried to engage the other blade, seeing another wrapped face pop up behind the two in front of him, ready to jump in as soon as one of them was down.  A red hot tracery slashed his chest as one of the blades scored a mark, and Ari felt panic race around the edges of his mind. 
Lord Il,
he screamed silently,
for Selah’s sake!

Suddenly, an arrow sprouted out of the chest of one of his antagonists and Ari instantly pressed his attack on the other, spurred on by this new hope.  The Tarq waiting in the wings moved up quick as shifting sand, but he, too, grew an arrow before he could even trade steel strokes.  Finally, Ari got his man, pushing him triumphantly off his blade back into the small group pressing in behind him.  But there were more, and the fear and the rush of adrenaline and the frantic swordplay seemed to blend endlessly in his mind, until he lost track of which opponent he was on and it seemed like minutes and it seemed like days until there were no more.  Panting, though he
’d hardly shifted his feet more than a foot or two in any direction, he turned to thank whoever had been shooting those blessed arrows over his shoulder—and found himself staring at Rodge.

“It
’s physics,” Rodge explained shakily, lowering his bow.  “Trajectory, you know…and the interaction of mass with a mass of higher velocity.”  He smiled weakly and Ari reached out a big hand to squeeze his shoulder.  “You saved my life, Rodge,” he panted.  But his friend, far from lighting up with joy at this proclamation, turned paler than ever.  He muttered, “Uh, oh.” 

Ari didn
’t even remember telling his body to turn, he was just suddenly facing back in the direction of attack, roving eyes assessing the danger.  The Tarq weren’t through, yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

“Selah,” he said seriously, whirling and focusing all his concentration on to that glowing face, “you
’ve got to let me go.  Our lives depend on it; I need my good arm—” She wasn’t listening.  Raemon was talking loudly now, his voice bringing even more noise to the cacophony of his Hall, and she was engrossed with it.  Her plain face was transformed with brilliance, the power of it so blazingly pure that he could hardly look at it.  Shocked into stillness, staring unbelievingly at her, he finally whispered, “Empress,” unable to look at her and deny that earth-shattering fact.

And she turned her eyes to him.  It was the brightness of a thousand campfires, her face, a cleanness so piercing that he felt his knees buckling in shame at his own lack, a vast, timeless, holy power so huge that the petty plays of realms and gods were…nothing… child
’s play…

The incandescent power of Il.

“You must not leave my side,” she said, voice throbbing through him like a lance of light.

“I promise,” he whispered brokenly.  He would never leave that glory, could never be happy again without seeking it; it captured him with its utter beauty, with its purity and strength.  To what else would he go?

Dimly, he felt the hot pain of steel slashing into his left arm, and drew himself reluctantly back from that fountain of life.  It took him a minute to clear his head, his body tossing his sword to his freed right hand and beginning to parry strokes without any conscious input from his brain.  But he was different, now, changed forever.  He had seen such light, such life, such soaring sanctity, that he would never be the same.  The carnage, the malice, the evil, the necessity of having to inflict such pain to counter it…sickened him.  They were all filth, even him, slimy as mindless worms, imprisoned by their own petty graspings for power and pleasure.

When he was free once more to look around, things had changed in the Hall.  There were noticeably less Tarq, for one…but there were hardly any Whiteblades either.  Now, just when he could really understand them, they were irrevocably disappearing out of his life. 

A few yards to his right, past a quavering Rodge, the Queen of the North had been revived.  She was weakly sitting up, struggling to get water swallowed from a skin Cerise was holding.  Relief surged through him.

A streak caught his eye and he turned barely in time to see Verrena pelting toward the Triele behind Voral.  Her black suede breeches were shiny with blood the entire length of one leg and her pale green blouse had been slit under the black vest.  It gapped as she ran, revealing a long, scarlet, globby gash from ribcage to hip on that side.  He forced himself to watch, hating it, hating what they were doing, but mostly hating that there was no purpose to it.  It might momentarily distract Raemon, but it wasn
’t like that served any greater good.  The god was still raging at Selah, who was forcefully answering his accusations a few incomprehensible inches from Ari. 

But as the Rider vanished forever, Ari noticed yet another development through his sharp sorrow.  The steps had been cleared by a conscientious Voral, and he could see that a little pile was forming under the Triele.  Dust?  Ash?  The poignancy of it made him turn his head and look desperately for something else to focus on. 

The Hall had been turned into a slaughterhouse.  Blood and gore and unseemly parcels of humanity almost obscured the floor—it was a grisly nightmare of man’s best.  The room was clear enough that he could pick out individual Whiteblades by the pockets of bodies that still moved, and these were dispersing one by one as the girls began to race for the Triele in a steady stream.  There was a pause now, when those bloodied hands grabbed the lethal surface of the stone, a delay before they were incinerated to nothing—and a growing pile of ash.  With each one, it took longer and longer, and Ari’s curiosity was morbidly aroused despite the agony of watching each bright, bloodied, beautiful Follower perish.

Finally, when the Tarq numbered no more than a few dozen, Rheine, gloriously and dazzlingly alive,
dashed past Voral, the only remaining Whiteblade.  Ari’s throat squeezed shut as he watched.  But Raemon, who’d been screaming invectives at the Empress, suddenly faded into almost silence as the Chieftess clung to the Triele.  The lurid red light slowed, flickered, winked in and out before she vaporized to ash.

Quickly, as if afraid she would lose him, Selah cried, “Where art thou, mighty Raemon?  Do you not admit now the folly of this gambit?  Will you not—”

“NO!!!” he roared suddenly, back to full life and sounding as formidable as ever.  “Do not drive me to ruin thee forever with thy taunts!”

“Now, Warrior!” she cried, her voice a crystalline, clarion trumpet across the horrendous carnage of the battleground.  And Voral, slashed with crimson in a hundred different places, pivoted instantly and leaped up the steps to that malignant stone, backswiping the opposition as she went.

It took a long time for her to go, so long Ari had time to pray she felt no pain.  She went down on one strong leg, her shining white blade slipping from nerveless fingers, her sweat-soaked, carrot-colored head bowed.  It seemed she was keeping her hand in place on the Triele only by great effort; it kept slipping down.  Raemon’s voice was completely silent.  Ari held his breath.  Whatever was happening was momentous; he could feel it shivering up and down his spine.

Then the Ruby Triele of Raemon gave one last, brilliant flash and was black forever.  And Voral,
last of the Legends of the Swords of Light, vanished into dust.

The ring of Sheelmen gathered around her, afraid to touch her—well, for obvious reasons—looked at each other, then uneasily at the quiescent Triele.  Far above their heads the roaring furnace built into the rock fluttered as if in a strong breeze—and unexpectedly went out.  A low rumbling began slowly to fill the chamber, and for a minute Ari thought it was Raemon coming back.  But it was not an angry black voice that filled the air…it was rocks.  One or two at first, seeming to fall from the sky, then a steadier rain of them, some of them as big as a man
’s head, accompanied by a shower of finer dust.

“Now, Ari!” the Empress cried victoriously and grabbed his arm, leading him along the rock wall closest to them.  She was searching it as if looking for something, peering high and low, fingers brushing it here and there, then moving on.  Ari, looking with her, felt the familiar dread rise again.  There was nothing here.  There was no door, no way out of this chamber.  After surviving the onslaught of all those Tarq, after all the Whiteblades—and Rach—that had died to save them, were they to be crushed to death now?  Buried under rock and Sheel, lost to the ages?  It seemed like the whole ceiling was coming down.

“Here!” she cried, pulling Ari over.  He’d seen it—a brief, mysterious red light had flashed across her face, and when he stepped into the same spot, it blinded him for a second, too.  But then something else happened.  Through all the falling debris, he saw a blackness appear in front of him.  A door.

She was shouting to the others; her search had carried her almost up to the steps to the altar at the front of the Hall, and several of the northerner party needed help getting up to where they were.  Behind them, the remaining Sheelmen, looking a little lost, got refocused at the sight of the enemy sneaking away.  They came in a rush, and Ari sprinted back to help with the rearguard.

Fighting, they backed toward the door, the steelsong muted with all the crashing of rocks and distant bass rumbling from underground.  Banion squeezed his bulk through the door with a heave and a grunt, then Melkin, then it was Ari’s turn, Kai snapping at him out of his impassive face, “Go!”

The door opened into a narrow passage, and while Kai dealt with the Tarq close on their heels, someone yanked Ari farther back.  The brief, blinding flash of light seared his eyes again, and the door ground gratingly closed.  And it was finally, blessedly, quiet.