Witchbreaker (Dragon Apocalypse) (39 page)

“There’s a lot of this dragon stuff I’m figuring out,” said Sorrow. “If you have any suggestions on how I can learn more, I’m willing to listen.”

“Bah. I wouldn’t waste such knowledge upon you. I see now that, while your mind has touched Rott, you are not yet the sole vessel of his essence. You’re still merely a mortal. It would be a simple thing to kill you.”

Sorrow’s heart skipped a beat. Could one dragon attack another in the convergence? She suddenly felt very alone, and wished that Stagger was here to refresh her memory of the rules.

As she thought this, the dark waters below began to brighten. She looked up and saw a pink glow breaking through the clouds above her. The storm parted and a shaft of golden sunshine burst down through the clouds.

“Sorry to interrupt,” a voice said.

“Stagger!” Sorrow shouted.

“The second usurper,” the thunder grumbled.

Stagger’s voice came from high above the clouds “I felt a tug to come here, so I did. I’ve been practicing looking into other realms, and even tried my hand at crafting avatars. Perhaps now that I’m here, Tempest, you could offer a few pointers?”

“I think not,” growled Tempest. A draconic head formed from the roiling clouds and fixed its gaze upon Sorrow. “I believe that you visit my kingdom intending no malice toward me. I will overlook the trespass... this time. Complete your journey with haste, then depart. We shall not speak again.”

There was a flash of light that washed away Sorrow’s sight and a clap of thunder that deafened her. She blinked and shook her head and the white persisted. Her body felt strangely heavy. She turned her head and the white shifted. She suddenly realized the lenses of her helmet were covered with snow. Somehow Tempest had pushed her back to the real world.

“Sorrow!” Slate was shouting from above. “Sorrow!”

She wiped the snow away from her visor and managed to sit up. Her legs were wedged between two massive rocks at the bottom of a steep slope. She pulled herself free with a grunt.

“Sorrow!” Slate shouted again, his voice slightly further away.

“I’m down here,” she yelled back.

“Are you alright?”

“I think so,” she said, examining the slope. She could see dark splotches among the fresh snow where she’d tumbled down. “I must have slipped and knocked myself out.”

Slate came sliding down the slope through the swirling snow. He was carrying a stout rope, one he’d had wrapped around the coffin.

“I’ve been looking for you for ten minutes! I worried you were dead, like the others.”

“Dead? What others?”

“The three pilgrims ahead of you. They were killed when the lightning struck!”

“Lightning?” she said. She shook her head. Her visit to the convergence seemed so unreal. Had Tempest really just paid her a visit that had proved fatal to bystanders? Or had she gotten jolted into unconsciousness by standing too close to a lightning strike and merely dreamed the whole conversation?

“Grab the rope!” Slate said as he reached her. “We can’t waste more time. I’ve sent the surviving pilgrims on ahead. If they stop moving in this storm, they’ll freeze...” His voice trailed off.

“What?” she asked.

“Your chest.”

To see what he was staring at, she removed her gauntlet and placed her hand on his helmet, willing the glass to form a mirror finish. The light was dim, but good enough to make sense of what she saw.

Her breastplate was scorched in three jagged parallel slashes. It looked for all the world as if a dragon had raked its claws across her chest.

T
HEY RECOVERED
T
OWER’S
coffin after they climbed out of the ravine, each lifting an end rather than wasting time wrapping it with ropes once more. They pressed forward at the quickest pace they could muster, their feet slipping in the mounting snow. Yet despite the misery of their condition, the light was definitely getting brighter. Had they climbed so far in the last few hours that they were now rising above the clouds?

This proved to be the case, as the snow faded into fog that changed instantly to ice as it splattered against them. The coffin grew increasingly heavy as the ice built.

The clouds came to an abrupt end as the path they traveled led into a long gap between two steep cliffs. The span between the cliffs was no more than fifty feet across. The sun was red as it sank into the ocean of clouds at their back, painting the cliff walls a deep crimson. Ahead, they saw the pilgrims on their knees, huddled before a wall of men in heavy fur coats who stood as a living barrier to their passage.

“Storm Guard?” Sorrow asked.

“Who else could it be?” answered Slate. They moved forward. Sorrow counted thirteen guards. She couldn’t tell if they wore armor beneath their coats, but could see that they were armed with heavy hammers and battleaxes. In contrast to the clean-shaven, slender soldiers of the city, these were large, burly men with thick black beards and bushy eyebrows. Their coats were silver and brown, pieced together from the hides of wolves.

Slate lowered his end of the coffin. Sorrow set her end down. They marched through the kneeling pilgrims, who had their hands clasped before them in prayer.

The largest of the armed men stepped forward and shouted in short, guttural syllables.

“Do you not speak the Silver Tongue?” asked Slate.

The pilgrim who was missing an eye said, “They demand twenty moons for safe passage, and that you surrender your weapons.”

“Tell him my weapon is a sacred relic that will not be relinquished.”

The man frowned. “If I tell them that, they definitely won’t let us pass unmolested. They’ll steal the relic and hold it for ransom.”

“So be it,” said Slate. “Tell them.”

The man swallowed hard. With a look of pain, he choked out a string of syllables.

The leader smiled as he barked back a response.

“It’s as I feared,” the one-eyed man said. “He now demands we turn over the relic in exchange for safe passage.”

“Tell him...”

Before Slate could finish, the leader barked out a new jumble of sounds.

“He says that if you cause trouble, his men will kill all of us. He asks that you weigh your answer carefully.”

Slate looked at Sorrow. “Are you ready to give our answer?”

“I’m ready if you’re ready,” said Sorrow.

Slate removed the Witchbreaker from its scabbard. The walls of the narrow canyon echoed with the howls of the damned.

Sorrow dropped her mace and allowed her gauntlets to crumble to rust.

“Anything you want to teach me, now’s the moment,” she said.

Slate replied, “Just follow my lead,” not guessing that she hadn’t been talking to him. He said to the translator, “Tell them to clear our path, or face destruction.”

“There are thirteen of them,” the man answered weakly. “There are only two of you. You’re gambling with our lives!”

“You’re the ones who begged to join us,” Sorrow snapped. “Just tell him what Slate said.”

The man turned pale as the looked back at the warriors and gave his answer.

The thirteen warriors roared in unison, raising their axes and hammers. Before they could finish inhaling, Slate leapt forward and drove the Witchbreaker deep into the belly of the leader. A soulful wail of terror filled the air, though nothing but bloody gurgles escaped the dead man’s lips.

A half dozen of the warriors leapt toward Slate as he kicked the leader free of his blade. The rest of the men charged the kneeling pilgrims, with only Sorrow standing in their path.

Breathe flies,
Avaris commanded.
You will feel a door open within your belly. Do not let go of this door!

Sorrow was familiar with the sensation, having used this power to dispatch a band of warriors she’d faced in Hush’s lair. She pulled her helmet free as the pressure built within her stomach. In her mind’s eye, she saw the small black portal in her center, wobbling and warping as flies boiled into her belly.

She was vaguely aware that a warrior was three strides away from smashing a warhammer down on her bare scalp. She opened her lips and the man’s face disappeared in a tornado of flies that erupted from inside her. The hammer dropped as his fingers went limp, and he fell to his knees before her, his body collapsing against her legs. She looked down and found his face was nothing but a skull writhing with maggots.

Don’t allow yourself to be distracted! Do not lose the door!

Sorrow found the disembodied voice screaming at her far more distracting than the dead man rapidly falling to bits around her feet. The boundaries of the black gate grew fuzzy. Suddenly, she lost all sense of where its edges lay.

Fool! You’ve just allowed more of Rott’s essence to bleed into your physical body. When you open a door, you must have the discipline to close it properly!

“Good advice,” Sorrow said as she watched the other warriors near her fall to the ground, tearing at the maggots writhing under their skin. “Maybe if you hadn’t waited to tell me until one second before I needed to know, I might have found it useful.”

She was snapped back from her argument with Avaris to her present danger by a head bouncing past her.

Slate had finished off four of the Storm Guard and was currently driving his blade into the fifth. Unfortunately, the sixth had bolted, and had run quite some distance up the path. She couldn’t allow him to bring reinforcements.

She glanced back at the pilgrims, whose mouths gaped in horror at the maggot-ridden body before her. She felt something tickling her lip and brushed a fly away. If they’d witnessed this, there was no reason to hold back. With a thought, her armor fell away and she leapt into the air, still carrying her mace. The guard made it another hundred feet before she dropped onto his back, driving the mace into his neck with all her strength. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been lying when she’d said the mace was hollow. Her victim still struggled beneath her, and if he made it to his back and freed his arms, he might yet cause her grief.

She placed her hand upon the nape of his neck. She imagined the black portal once more, this time opening in her shoulder. She focused as dark energy flowed down her arm and the man’s flesh liquefied in her grasp. She never took her mind’s eye off the portal. Clenching her jaw, she willed the pulsing black circle to grow smaller, then smaller still. With a final gasp, she closed it completely.

She raised her hand, wrinkling her nose at the pink gore that coated it.

Well done. If you maintain such discipline in the future, you may grow powerful indeed.

“And if I don’t?”

You’ll lose the last of your humanity as Rott consumes you.

Sorrow nodded. The risks were clearly laid out. Before, she’d been frightened by the uncertainty of what dangers she faced. Now she knew what the risks were, and could push through the fuzzy veil of fear into the firm embrace of pure terror.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A BIT OF CLEVER MAGIC

T
HE WIND HOWLED
through the narrow stone gap as Sorrow stared at her gore-covered hand. She knelt and wiped her fingers on the man’s wolf coat, then headed back down the pass to retrieve her armor before she froze to death.

Slate stood over the maggot-ridden bodies of the men she’d killed. The pilgrims were all huddled together, still on their knees, their eyes wide as they stared at Sorrow. At least, most of them were staring at her. Quite a few eyes were focused instead on Slate, who still held the ebony sword in his grasp, filling the air with faint cries of agony.

“What magic is this?” Slate asked as she drew close. “These men have been reduced to skeletons!”

“You knew I had tapped into Rott’s power,” she said.

“When we fought the pirates together, your methods were less... disturbing.”

Sorrow arranged the components of her discarded armor and molded her now ice-cold iron shell back into position. She commanded the metal to warm, but her teeth were still chattering as she said, “I don’t think you’re in any position to declare my methods disturbing. You just sent your enemies’ souls directly to hell.”

As if to prove her point, the screams of torment that echoed from the sword grew louder.

“Is this not an appropriate fate for the wicked?”

“I’m not certain it is,” she said. “First, the Storm Guard have a very different conception of the afterlife from the Church of the Book. I’m not up on my theology, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t feel like their actions were going to earn them an eternity in a fiery pit tormented by demons.”

“The failings of their belief system are unfortunate,” said Slate. “Without the fear of hell, how are men of weak morals to be brought to the path of righteousness?”

“So you admit that this church you’re so enamored of uses fear and the threat of torture to ensure obedience?”

Slate frowned. “It’s not as simple as that. Men who behave in compliance with the Divine Author’s will are rewarded with paradise. The possibility of hell is merely...”