Light Dawning Page 5

  Six of them surrounded the street's only exit in an arcing semi-circle, marching slowly into a tighter formation. He'd seen this deployment of soldiers the night of the riot, and knew what deadly effect it would have, especially on injured men with their backs against the wall. Two of them leveled lethal spears tipped by steel offering a range he couldn't hope to outmatch with his woefully inadequate dagger, still stuck in the soldier's skull. The rest readied those distinctive spiked weapons in anticipation of the blows they'd be able to rain down once Myrr and Casterly had been stuck through a few times.

  He dropped his head and sighed, knowing this would be the end, and all for nothing. Once he was dead the rest of the soldiers would still find the women and children and assure them a similar fate.

  Or maybe not, if he finally called out to his hidden companion, as he'd so recently sworn he'd never do.

  Facing the looming wave of death slowly crashing towards him, Myrr felt deep inside to the secret hollow place, seeking out the presence that wouldn't leave. Sensing the cold wave of satisfaction as it was called on, Myrr nearly abandoned his plan at the last moment and accepted death instead, but found his mouth opened and spoke despite his reservations.

  He firmly called out a name the artifact had put in his mind, flowing through him even more sharply than before. The word rang throughout the alleyway as all time slowly ticked to a stop and a familiar pain bloomed inside.

  In a rush of sensation, the force behind the name answered, pulling apart a diaphanous veil and taking up greater residence inside Myrr, expanding that secretly recessed place within and forcing him to recall the moment he'd first touched the darkness. It had flickered in and out of existence, here one moment and gone the next, teaching him something even then before it had invaded him body and soul.

  The eternal instant of direct contact with his parasite finally passed and Myrr knew what to do. Through an intense effort of will that threatened to shatter his fragile psyche, he shifted himself to the side, instinctively sliding the parts of himself that provided physical form through the thin membrane of reality most didn't know was constantly smothering them.

  One of the knights shouted out an order to advance more quickly when Myrr disappeared from sight, drawing the darkness around him like a cloak, spontaneously pulling it in towards the thing inhabiting his body. The darkness understood what lay within him, and it actively sought to be near its father, suddenly turned sentient in face of the artifact's power.

  He didn't know what steel piercing his heart felt like, but he hoped the cold, sharp pain would be less than the chill that overcame when he called on the shadows that so eagerly answered what lay hidden within.

  Easily shifting past the soldiers without notice and rushing ahead, he stopped at the alley's entrance, resolute in the knowledge that he couldn't leave Casterly behind. A pull from the artifact let him know it agreed, but it wouldn't be satisfied with misdirection or slinking away in the night.

  Despite a monumental struggle to keep lips firmly pressed together, he shouted out the name again, solidifying back into sight and waiting until he caught their notice. He didn't know why, but his unwanted companion needed these soldiers to see him, and to realize what they were searching for was right before them. Working on instinct and the urging of the thing inside, he focused on the blackness he'd seen and held his hand towards the half dozen knights, still in formation even when facing this unknown threat.

  A ghostly emerald outline of the segmented metal gauntlet flickered into a stable appearance around his outstretched hand when the accumulated negative energy burst forth, tearing apart all in its path. There would have been hoarse terrified screaming, but all sound was drawn into the thick bolts of terrible nothing, casting blackest shadows across the alley that would burn into the stone and never come free.

  In an instant six men were reduced to smoking black ash and boiling crimson blood, and the sensation of deep, wintry satisfaction that the ethereal gauntlet pulsed through his soul had him bent over retching, trying to purge himself of the invading force.

  Letting his gaze linger across the wall at those unnaturally burned shadows scattered across the building's facade, Myrr wretched all the harder when they seemed to tremble and look back at him. Heedless of his friends or the dead knights, Myrr fled madly then, not caring for direction or destination. He let go of the reins of conscious thought and allowed his parasitic companion to step in, taking shelter deep inside himself and away from the harsh taskmaster of sanity. While the artifact rode his body and sight slipped away, his last thought was the hope it would direct him into harm's way and put an end to it all.

  6 (Eastern Ward, Border District, Late Dimmet)

  Much like another resolute survivor recently braving the streets, Tala squinted as she shouldered open the wood door and made her way into the world above, which was a much-changed place from when she'd left it. Something struck her as it rushed by, nearly tearing the bundle she clutched from her hands. In a daze she stumbled forward, slowly coming to the conclusion that the surrounding blur of motion wasn't all in her head.

  At first it was just stragglers in ones and twos, running at a speed that indicated their lives depended on it, but soon the droplets of terrified humanity coalesced into a stream, threatening to become a raging river that flooded the street. The whole city seemed to be on the move, with a stampede of the desperate all flowing in one direction, fleeing some unseen cataclysm.

  The first cadre of soldiers came next, screaming orders and threats and cutting down those who didn't move fast enough to escape the reach of their weapons. Before long, they too were gone as the sea of living and soon-to-be dead continued its roll through the ward.

  The specifics barely registered for Tala, her whole world focused on the dead insane thing held tightly against her chest as she struggled through the roving crowd, pushing forward as the only minnow swimming against the current. A break in the tide ahead had her pushing forward with renewed vigor, normal thought beginning its fuzzy return and a hint of a destination taking shape.

  Looking down to ensure the remains were close and secure, she didn't see another desperate mother break out of the crowd and push ahead, pulling along two half-dead young ones of her own who struggled to keep pace. They collided with an irresistible force, pulled together as though by a fate insisting that the families of Cestia despair at what might be and what might have been.

  The bundle went spilling from Tala's arms, the cloak she'd used to hide her child fluttering down the street and consumed by the latest crashing wave of stampeding human cattle. It was the smaller of the two children that saw the splayed arachnid legs and smashed infant face first, resulting in a screaming fit that drew the inattentive mother's notice. The woman moved forward threateningly to kick the decaying horror away from her own brood, drawing an intense hissing from Tala that she worried sounded more like a stream of whispers.

  Drawing herself to her full height and descending on the terrified family, she let the hiss grow to a scream of impossible proportions, sending them and the surrounding panicked rabble back into their blind charge down the street. The sight of the emaciated children had been upsetting, but not out of place. People were getting desperate as the city's granary ran low, and even those few charitable individuals with enough to spare had stopped giving, as mobs of hungry parents desperate to feed their children had ransacked more than one home when rumor spread of hidden caches of supplies.

  Now with nothing to wrap him in, she grabbed what was left of her child and pushed forward, heedless of the sharp stabbing pain blossoming across her shoulder. One of his precious appendages, broken back at an impossible angle from a blow dealt by the soldiers, jutted out and sliced across her arm and side, sawing back and forth repeatedly during her struggle against the tide that showed no signs of slowing down. She didn't bother moving it aside, unwilling to take her eyes off what lay ahead a second time, accepting the pain as punishment for not protecting her offspring as that other
mother had done. Her children may have been starving, but at least they were alive.

  The sharp stinging was soon accompanied by a hot trickle that she perversely reveled in feeling, letting each drop act as surrogate to the sorrow she couldn't release yet. Not until he was properly laid to rest.

  The storm of internal sound had quieted when her child breathed his last alongside his killers, but now out in the dangerous city streets they gathered strength again, building back to the constant hurricane roar. Flush with success at their one brief moment of freedom when her shield had cracked, they had redoubled their efforts and screamed as never before. They'd never been this close to overtaking her, but she knew how to silence them once again.

  Years of endless rote exercise had taught her that stability and banal ritual was the greatest defense against the madness. It didn't matter that the creature held in her arms was an abomination against all that was natural and good. A dead son meant a funeral, and a funeral meant stability against the delirium screaming across her skull. She knew a place that few went where he could rest undisturbed, but first she'd have to find a way through the endless surges of human fodder that kept trying to pull her in the opposite direction.

  The burning smell hit her nostrils before she saw the gout of smoke wafting up from the east. The sight at last gave some hint as to the cause of the continuing stampede, now dying off as she shouldered her way through the latest wave into a run down side street away from the riot. As stifled as they were by the light drizzle now dampening the cobblestones beneath, the burning wisps of a new blaze still managed to float lazily across the horizon.

  It was unclear whether the soldiers were chasing those who started the latest fire or whether the crowd was fleeing after being purposefully burnt out of their homes. In the end it wouldn't matter who had initiated this new barbaric act. They could all burn or be trampled, so long as she could make her way through the city to Brimstone Briar, where she could hide her son away from the horrors of Cestia.

  When a gust of wind brought a momentary clearing of the haze in the distance she could finally make out what had given the once-lush area its new name. Resting northward in the high ward, it was a shape everyone living under the boot heel of the knighthood knew to fear. A massive behemoth of stone and iron, the obelisk towered above every other building in any ward of the city. Flat on all sides and impossibly smooth, letting one's gaze linger too long on its impenetrable blackness was known to be unhealthy, like staring into some void opposite of the sun.

  Placing one foot in front of the other while ignoring the pain that had dulled to a numb sensation, Tala grabbed hold of the night in which the city had fallen, keeping the voices away with the stability of clear memory. Each edge of the obelisk came to a sharp and distinct point that reminded her of the knighthood's preferred weaponry, and defying all laws of logic and reason, it had propelled itself through the air, easily bypassing the walls that had kept out all invaders in the past.

  Blazing unholy emerald fire from some unseen furnace within and held aloft by arcane means unknown, it had come over the eastern ward's outer wall, bypassing the city's defenses entirely and easily pushing aside the arrows and rocks that clattered against its unyielding surfaces. Brimstone Briar is where it had stopped first as it annihilated all opposition that could be mustered.

  When the fire and lightning stopped raining down from above, a contingent of soldiers had come spilling out, hacking apart everything in their path on a mad rush to the eastern gate, letting in the remaining invaders lying in wait outside. One single evening was all it took for one of the greatest southern cities to fall, and all because of that dark obelisk now standing stock still on the edge of the high ward to the north.

  It remained immobile and unused, as it had every day since the city's fall, home now only to circling birds. Every Cestian remembered the moment it arrived and fervently hoped it didn't begin its slow rotating motion ever again.

  While everyone within the walls had seen its arrival, only those in the high ward at the time of the attack, as Tala had been, witnessed the horror of its descent. Beneath those smooth planes of obsidian lurked dozens of thick tendrils, writhing and grasping, protruding from the bottom and finding purchase to sink into the vulnerable earth. The ground was scorched and blackened for a hundred yards in all directions where it had landed, as though unable to abide what was living inside it now.

  Her ever-present whispers seemed as disturbed by the obelisk as anyone else in Cestia, their constant chattering taking on an angry and fearful tone whenever she spent too long gazing across the flat surfaces. The notion that something could distress the ghostly choir within her should have been terrifying, but now she found a perverse joy in their anger, staring into the inky depths partly obscured by the clouds of belching ash.

  Focusing strongly on the memory of what the obelisk had done, she nearly stumbled into more obvious signs of its handiwork when the first broken line of jagged black thorns announced she had reached Brimstone Briar. Once a beautiful garden known by a different name, the wall of brambles and towering oaks had bridged the eastern and western wards before the night of the city's downfall.

  What wasn't left a smoldering ruin by the twisting bolts of black force raining down from the sky had been forever changed. While the bottoms of the formerly mighty trees remained alive, the tops had blackened and hardened into impenetrable stone. In a twisted reflection of the city itself, half struggled to remain alive while half was broken by foul magic, never to return to former glory.

  The sane tended to avoid the cursed place, as it was known to put any in a darker mood than even everyday life under occupation could create. Tala did not count herself among that number, and so pushed on into the deeper parts of the thicket as the rain went from a buzzing drizzle to a steady downpour. Near the center of the Briar was the destination she'd envisioned while pushing through the waves of humanity out in the streets.

  Among the largest of plant life found in the smoldering ruin of the formerly beautiful Cestia, bested only by the majestic topiary in the high ward's grove, the weathered tree ahead had survived the assault and subsequent occupation. Only the farthest tips of its branches had succumbed to the wasting obsidian sickness afflicting all the surrounding foliage.

  Tala had heard tales of frontier towns far to the north where people who lived free would use trees of such soaring heights as gathering places for bindings and birthings. She couldn't imagine anyone ever gathering for a joyful purpose here, and so it would serve as a proper burial ground.

  Her burden was finally placed on the ground before the massive trunk, and with no tool for digging, she sunk her hands into the damp patch of earth. Pulling out handful after handful of muck, the memories of the city's fall started to fade and the voices began pulling at the edges of her thoughts again.

  Ever since that crack had appeared, their alien song had shifted somehow, and now every few words went from insane gibberish to clear speech. She didn't know whether they were becoming accustomed to language or whether something had changed within allowing her to now understand their rantings. Either option seemed equally worrisome.

  As she pulled out another handful of muddy soil they raged along in her skull, screaming that Tala was sure to get everything she ever wanted, but only delivered in the most perverse ways they could conjure up in their depraved existence. They spoke of promises to be delivered, with all heart's desires twisted into nightmare forms. The wretched, starving children she'd seen before were not worthy of jealousy, as the murmuring assured Tala her family tree would far outstrip the branches of his funereal marker. More children could be birthed, so many more, if only she'd put her guard down for a few moments.

  The ranting reached a fever pitched as her nails finally hit hard rock below and she knew she'd gone deep enough. The joys of life that other people were able to experience, even in this horror of an occupied city, would forever be denied to her. If she dared to hope, life would put her hopes down so h
ard she'd have no choice but to smother them herself. There was plenty of room around the base of the tree for all her deeply-held wishes to be interred.

  Grabbing up what remained of her shattered child, Tala focused on the ritual of the event, remembering that normality kept them quiet and prevented them from reaching through her. She had to bury the shattered, oozing thing in her arms. Reaching back to her earliest days in the monastery where the robed men had beaten their lessons into her, she began reciting a funeral litany from rote memory, unsure if the words would mean anything.

  The tears that had been held back so long finally came then, threatening to overshadow the pouring rain. It was a monstrous dead thing and she still loved it. It had never even really been alive, not in any way that made sense or required reason, but she still loved it. It was her first child, and she would see it properly laid to rest. Not even the Knights of the Black Gauntlet could take that from her.

  She placed it down into the damp hole then, focusing only on completing the custom and putting this nightmare behind her. Stability would keep the insanity at bay. It didn't matter that it giggled and cooed and shuddered even though it was dead. Tala reached down and stroked the remnants of its face, whispering for it to be still and rest in peace. Pushing the dirt and muck back into position, a hollow realization hit that the whispers had been right. She'd never loved anything as much as the terror she was burying here.