Each step leading to Klaishil’s palace was huge, ceremonially so. Amris saw the bodies lying strewn across them, but used as he was to passing corpses in the streets, he didn’t focus on any until one raised a dark, mustached face and he saw what had once been Damos.
Blaise’s profanity filled the air, even above the sounds of battle. Amris couldn’t have gotten sound from his throat even if he’d taken the time to curse. He simply bolted for the step where the other man lay, more of a puddle than a body and yet somehow still living.
“The man himself,” Damos rasped, as Amris came within earshot. What was left of his mouth strained over the next words. Amris would have given his life to not need to hear what came next, to be able to tell his sergeant to rest easy and lie quiet. He held still, listening. “Came. Blasted us. Five minutes gone, or so. Went up,” Damos went on, gesturing to the palace with the boneless remnant of a hand. “Lady’s there. Was firing on them. A couple guards with her. We slew his. I tried for him. I thought I’d struck, but…I’m sorry, General.”
“No,” said Amris, his voice sounding no better than Damos’s, even though he had lungs. “You did well. Go with the gods.”
He brought his sword down on the man’s neck. The light in Damos’s eyes faded, and he slumped back against the bloody marble, to Amris’s relief. Sometimes even beheading didn’t end the suffering of Thyran’s most immediate victims.
“General?”
It was Jazmin, red-eyed, broken-voiced, but tearless—tears took water, and they’d all lacked that for a long time. The others were beside her, waiting.
If Damos was right, Thyran was alone, or nearly so. Amris alone could use the rose he carried: the others who’d received them were on other battlefields, or with Letar. None of the half dozen who watched him with weary, grimy faces could end the five years of hell, and he wished with all his heart he could have simply considered that and bid them go.
Yet Thyran was not invincible. The fighting might have worn down even his shields and contingencies. A succession of attacks, when the sorcerer had no guards, might do likewise, could buy Amris time to act or even mean he didn’t need to. He couldn’t let himself hope so far, but he couldn’t discount the possibility either.
“We go in,” he said, and began to climb the stairs.
* * *
Inside, Thyran had left a trail of warped doors, twisted walls, and bloody boot prints. The palace hadn’t stood long before his onslaught, any more than most people did, and he’d taken no care to hide his course. Amris would likely have been able to guess regardless.
The first of Lady Winthair’s guards lay dead at the foot of the inner stairs—truly dead, in a mercy that had likely been mere convenience for Thyran. His ribs had grown outward from his chest, sprouting white and red through his armor. Amris didn’t look longer, but ran on.
He heard the scream midway up the stairs. It almost masked an assortment of wet sounds. Afterward, metal clanged against stone. Amris gripped his sword tightly in one hand, Gerant’s rose in the other.
“If you can, get the lady out,” he told Jazmin. “I’ll chance the rest.”
There was no time to argue, nor reason for it. Noble blood wasn’t sufficient protection from Thyran, not even when tied to the land, but he got power from making that nobility bow before him, and everybody broke in the end. Lady Winthair’s ties to Klaishil had helped them for a while. Now they’d be a liability, should Thyran get his hands on her.
Jazmin nodded. Neither she nor Amris wasted breath speaking while they climbed the stairs, but their eyes met as they’d done a score of times in battle, conveying messages in the shorthand of those who’d fought together for years.
This time, the message was goodbye.
It wasn’t completely certain—if all went well with the plan Gerant and Her Holiness had concocted, they’d meet again, with Thyran defeated and a world to rebuild. All very rarely went well. Every one of the people ascending the staircase with Amris knew that.
At the top of the staircase, he caught sight of Thyran’s robe, gray silk billowing in the cold wind as the sorcerer strode down the hallway. The armor of another guard lay on the landing behind him. What was within could no longer properly be called a body.
Thyran was muttering to himself as he walked, lashing out with dark power at every door he found, and that gave Amris and his troops a few moments of cover before he heard them. They used the time to scatter, as much as they could in a hallway, and the Dukes of Klaishil had built their halls wide. Jazmin and Blaise ducked through the nearest door. They’d make their way to the lady by inner door or secret passage, Amris knew, or climb along the windowsills as a last resort. He and the Pine spread out, each taking a different wall.
Magic was already bursting from Thyran’s fingers when he turned. The Pine whipped his shield up in front of his body. Amris, charging, saw the metal melt without heat, fusing with the arm behind it, and heard his soldier’s shout of agony.
He couldn’t stop. They’d both known as much.
There was Thyran in front of him, the ordinary middle-aged face topped by a crown of jewels and bone, the milky blue eyes aware, yet empty of all feeling Amris could have recognized. As Amris slashed for the sorcerer’s throat, that changed: he did recognize alarm in the other man’s expression, and was glad of it, for a fleeting moment before one of the jewels flickered and his muscles locked in place.
That had happened before—not with Thyran, and not defensively, but Amris knew the sensation. He could still breathe, and he did. Thyran glared at him, recognition dawning first, then a more specific hatred than the sort he seemed to have for the world. His hands started to glow again.
Amris remembered Gerant: rolling over to face him with a sweet smile, sunlight pouring over them both, pacing the study gesturing with enthusiasm over a new theory, and sleeping peacefully beside him. Dark Lady, be with my love, he prayed, feeling his muscles begin to relax, until we meet again.
He raised the rose as Thyran lifted his hands. “Be still,” Amris said—and time itself froze around them.
Chapter 2
105 years after Thyran’s War
A skull was gnawing on her heel.
Darya kicked backward into the nearest wall and heard bone shatter, but the jawbone held on. She couldn’t kick very hard, lest she bring down the tunnel of ruined masonry she was crawling through, and she didn’t have enough room to stand or turn around.
Undeath isn’t contagious once they’re down to the bones, Gerant said in her mind. The emerald in the hilt of Darya’s sword flickered to the rhythm of his speech.
“That’s a relief,” she said, “but I’d rather not hunt a cockatrice with half my foot gone. Get off, you stupid thing—it’s not like eating does you any good!”