A Season of Rendings Read online

  On the luxurious balcony above, a swarm of archers opened fire.

  He plucked an arrow from midair before it could punch through his sternum, knocked another away with his elbow, and rolled beneath the rest. Then he roared and charged at the Preservers, brandishing the arrow and forcing them into defensive stances—before leaping fifteen feet to the balcony and tearing into the archers instead.

  He slammed one's head into the rail, then blocked another—coming at him with a knife—and used the man's own momentum to send him flying over. A few foolish archers loosed at him despite the fact he was smack in the middle of them; he dodged the onslaught and heard the cries as the arrows punched across into the archers' own ranks.

  The ruse had bought him precious seconds, but they were over. Marcus's Preservers leapt to the balcony rail, then slipped easily into flanking him before he could react. He retreated to the wall, blocking attacks from both sides, desperate to negate their advantage. He couldn't. The attacks started to slip through: a knock to the shoulder throwing off his next block, a blast to the ribcage, an attempted trip that failed but still left him off balance. Adding up fast into an equation he could never balance.

  They were strong, and worse, they were skilled.

  "Seth!" Syntal's voice, somewhere down below. "Get out of there!" He tried, but he was losing. Another blow to the ribs, this one breaking something; a shot to the stomach that would have left a lesser man gasping. He threw a wild haymaker, forcing one of his attackers back for a split second, then feinted left. The other Preserver darted the wrong way to block him, giving an instant's opening which he used to break for the railing, where an archer with a death wish lunged for him and missed.

  He flipped off the balcony and saw it explode behind him.

  The Preservers screamed, lighting up like dry scrub in a wildfire. The archers died or fled.

  Seth landed hard, forced to his knees by his broken rib. Marcus's Preservers landed just in front of him, angels of flaming death, unstoppable.

  Syntal drew a thread of lightning between them. He saw their bones dancing in their flesh as they died.

  He went inside! she shouted, her voice a muffled whisper behind the echo of thunder in his ears. He glanced back and saw her standing halfway up the palace stairs, her face smeared with blood and her emerald eyes so vivid they left the world around them grey.

  He turned his back to her, ignored his screaming rib, and burst through the palace doors.

  ix. Lyseira

  Iggy crouched over her, tearing out arrows. "Can you still see?" he shouted over the roar of the fight. "Can you heal yourself?" He grabbed her under the shoulders, ready to haul her to safety if she gave the wrong answer—but she lurched away, spilled into a pool of her own blood, and called the fire. The wounds closed. The rip in her vision grew wider.

  "They're losing!" he shouted as she stumbled back to her feet. "There's too many soldiers, they can't get through!" He grasped the corner of the building and looked around, into the melee and the swarm of arrows. He clenched his jaw, eyes suddenly hardening.

  A high wind rose from nowhere, blowing east. It caught the arrows still raining down from the balconies, and scattered them into the walls like broken sewing needles.

  Lyseira started past him, prepared to die doing what she could. Isaic joined her. "What are you doing?" she demanded. "You'll die out here!"

  "Blackboots!" Isaic shouted, ignoring her. "Any man who fights for me this day will be rewarded! Today, Keswick ends the reign of the Church! We drive them out of our city forever! Send them running like rats!"

  The square lay thick with burning corpses and the wounded, but more joined the mob every second, streaming in from the streets. They heard his words and cheered.

  "You don't have to fight! Lay down your weapons and retreat! I will know you!" He pushed forward toward the throng, one arm raised, a vision from a war story. He's going to die, Lyseira realized. Iggy's wind still kept the arrows at bay, but it would only take a single miracle to end him. "I swear I will know you!"

  The hairs on her arms stood up. The air thickened.

  Akir protect him! she screamed, throwing one arm wide. Akir protect―!

  Fire roared from the sky, devouring him. He screamed and flinched, curling into himself.

  But when the flames vanished, he stood unharmed.

  He looked at himself in disbelief. When he realized what had happened, he hurled a fist skyward and roared.

  The mob roared with him.

  One Blackboot broke for the alley. Another threw down his sword; for his treason, the man behind him ran him through. Another attacked that man, and the whole line fell to a chaos of screams and flashing swords. But still the mass of them sufficed to hold back the mob, who continued to fall under the clerics' relentless onslaught.

  Then a white flash hurled a cleric into the temple wall. An instant later, two more crumpled where they stood. Just as the first premonitions of fear shuddered through the them, the stairs beneath their feet belched a sprawling gout of flame.

  As Harth and Angbar finished their chants, the clerics erupted in panic and conflagration.

  Akir judges! the mob screamed. Akir judges! They surged forward again.

  This time, the line shattered. The people of Keswick flooded over the burning clerics, butchering them where they stood.

  Then they poured into the heart of Majesta, roaring.

  x. Seth

  He kept the howling pain from his broken rib bottled in a corner of his mind, where he could use it if needed. If that bottle broke, he was finished; but for now, his training held.

  He careened around a corner into a pair of guards, smashed their heads together, and took in another hallway—empty except for the servants vanishing into the adjacent rooms. Seth chased after them, into a kitchen.

  "Where is he?" he demanded. A butler fled into the pantry. Two serving women collapsed in the corner, crying.

  "Talk!" Syntal shouted as she came in behind him. Her hands came up to start another spell and Seth slapped them, breaking her concentration. "No!" he snapped. "Idiot!" She glared daggers at him.

  "Marcus!" he demanded, turning back to the serving women. "Galen Wick! Did they come through here?"

  "They t-took Jan to th-the congress room," one of the servers managed.

  Behind, Seth could hear the roar of the mob. They'd reached the palace.

  "Show me!" he said, but she recoiled farther against the wall, whimpering. He remembered glimpsing himself in a mirror as he'd raced through the halls—his wig crazily askew, eyes wild, face streaked with blood and soot—and suddenly understood her fear. He ripped the useless wig from his head and threw it in a corner.

  "Please," he said, swallowing his bloodlust long enough to manage the word. "I won't hurt you. But that mob will. You have to get out of here anyway. Show me where he went." He held out his hand, offering to help her up. "Please," he repeated.

  "Are you here to kill them?" came a voice from behind him. An older woman, stooped and frail with eyes of flint, stood in the doorway he and Syn had just come through.

  Seth met her gaze and rolled the dice. "Yes."

  "Thank Akir for that," she said. "This way."

  She led them down the hall to an ornate door, but found it locked when she tried to open it. "They say it has a secret exit," she said as she hunted through her pockets for the key. "Probably why they went there. Cowards are running."

  No, Seth thought. No, hurry, by God would you hurry up?

  Finally she found the key and unlocked the door. A simple staircase beyond descended to the cellar. "Short hall at the bottom," she said. The mob poured into the palace behind her, whooping and screaming, smashing statues and tearing the paintings from the walls. "It's in the middle on the left."

  Seth shoved past her and leapt the steps from one landing to the next, reaching the bottom in two hard jumps. His bottled pain clattered, but held. As Syntal scurried after him, he ran down the hall.

  The do
or to the congress room stood open. He burst through with his hands up, ready to fight, to go empty, to dodge fire.

  All of it unnecessary. They weren't in the room.

  Syntal caught up, fighting for breath. "Where are they?' she said. "Is he here?"

  "No." Seth trudged in, his useless rage howling. The woman had been wrong—there wasn't a secret exit from the room.

  There were five.

  Two trap doors beneath the long table, a pair of sliding panels on one wall, and a shifting bookcase on another. He knew this because all of them stood open, and Marcus could have gone through any of them.

  The trail was cold.

  He'd lost them.

  xi. Melakai

  The Preserver's blow slammed him to his back and sent him sliding across the chapel floor toward the vestibule doors, every muscle blazing in pain. It was a miracle he didn't break a hip.

  The battle roared just behind him, now. He caught glimpses of it as he stumbled to his feet. He hardly recognized Majesta square: churning with rioters, a thin line of Blackboots barely holding them at bay while nearly all of Majesta's clerics hurled miracles.

  Casualties of the fight, mainly Blackboots, littered the floor around him. He grabbed a discarded longsword from a moaning soldier and turned back—just in time to see Shephatiah's Preserver hurtle through the air toward him, murder in his eyes.

  He felt an instant of terror. A certainty of his own death.

  Then he thought of Takra, of Shephatiah attacking her or of the mad mob slaughtering her—and deep within him, something ignited.

  He roared and brought the sword up, thinking to impale the Preserver as he landed—and all his hate and rage and horror boiled out of him, ripped up along the blade, and blasted outward in fury and lightning. The chapel detonated with thunder. The bolt tore into the Preserver and blasted out through his back, reversing his momentum and spraying the pews below with char and gore. His body plunged to the floor and slid, lifeless, to the far wall.

  Kai stared at his hands and his weapon, at the streak of blood on the chapel floor, and tried to understand what had happened.

  Then, at the rear of the far altar, he saw Shephatiah backhand Takra again and drag her into the rear hall, slamming the door behind him. Suddenly Kai no longer cared how he had killed the Preserver. He charged.

  As he reached the altar, a final brutal series of booms and screams echoed behind him. The temple's defenders had broken. He heard the mob swarm in, looting and roaring. Some chanted something about judgment.

  He crashed through the door and saw the fat cleric vanishing around the left corner, hauling Takra by her hair. He gave chase into the monster's office, hurtled around the corner roaring—

  —and a Binding seized him.

  His legs tripped over themselves. His sword flew free as he plunged face-first to the carpet. He screamed silently; thrashed without moving.

  Shephatiah shuffled over and rolled him to his back. "Thorn," he said. "You piece of sehk." He brought a knife to Kai's throat, and Takra launched herself at his back, shrieking.

  Her nails shredded his face, tore into his eyes. Striped his cheeks with blood. He screamed and flailed with the knife, lurched to his feet and shoved backward. He caught her against his massive desk, blasted the air from her lungs, and got a lucky slice on her cheek, peeling away a strip of red flesh. As she fell away howling, he careened toward the massive window in the back of his office, grabbed a lantern, and smashed it through the stained glass. Then he hauled his bulk over the windowsill, heaving and kicking.

  He almost made it out before Takra ran him through.

  xii. Angbar

  The mob surged, a wave bearing him forward. It washed him past the broken line of black-booted guards, over the dead and dying clerics, and finally crested, spitting him out inside Majesta's chapel. Some of the rioters took to the walls, climbing for the riches that hung from the ceiling; others charged past, toward the sacred door that separated the clergy from their flock during Dawnday sermons.

  Angbar joined the second group. Not by any conscious decision—the Narrator was deafening now, shoving everything he heard and saw behind a curtain of prose and boxing it into the far recesses of his mind—but as if in a dream.

  Like a dreamer, he sought something; and with the certainty of dreaming, he would know it when he saw it.

  He passed through the sacred door, that torn veil between the unwashed masses and the Fatherlord's holy chosen, as the mob around him chanted and roared. He may have joined them; his throat was raw from smoke or screaming. But when the others boiled into side chambers and up the stairs, ravenous for more murder, he detoured to a heavy iron door: ajar, keys hanging from its lock, black stairs descending to a Hel beyond.

  He knew this place; the smell alone told him its purpose. He tore the keys from the door and pushed down the stairs.

  He has no idea who these people are. Why they are imprisoned. Surely some truly deserve it; surely rapists and murderers number among them; but he presses forward, past his doubts and misgivings. He strides to the closest cell as if he has become impervious to logic.

  "Please," the prisoner begs: wretched and groveling. "Please, I didn't do anything, you have to believe me."

  The hero takes out the keys. He unlocks the door. "Go," he says.

  And moves on to the next.

  xiii. Lyseira

  With the shreds of her vision she saw rioters burst onto the upper balconies, accosting the few surviving archers. Inside, she heard looters tearing through the temple, ripping down tapestries, toppling statues, and cheering.

  In time Seth and Syntal came to the square. Lyseira shouted her brother's name and swept him into an embrace he didn't return.

  "He escaped," Seth said. "Marcus got away." He wouldn't meet her eyes.

  "It doesn't matter." She'd wanted Marcus dead too, but now, taking in the carnage in the temple square, her appetite for death had soured.

  Isaic approached the few Blackboots who hadn't fled. They threw themselves at his feet, begging forgiveness. He kept his word and spared them, then ordered them to help tend to the wounded.

  There were many wounded.

  Most had been part of the mob, now charred and smoking or riddled with arrows. Several had been trampled. But there were clerics, too, and Justicars and Blackboots—many dead, but some still breathing, just barely clinging to life.

  You've had your first victory, Akir said. What kind of victor will you be?

  She knelt by the nearest casualty: a middle-aged man, pale, still clutching a trampled torch in one hand. An arrow jutted from his chest, turning his breath to a bright whistle. She pushed the arrow clear, then realized: she could heal him, but it would cost her vision. Without that, she wouldn't be able to find the others who needed her.

  One healing miracle? For all these wounded? Many would die—most would die.

  The weight of what she'd done, the sheer volume of blood and suffering she'd caused, slammed into her. I never wanted this! she cried, adrift in a sea of blood and smoldering fire. I didn't want it to come to this!

  "I can't!" she breathed. "Akir, please, I can't help them all. I can't . . ." Her breath came short, dissolving into sharp bursts that threatened to undo her. Such misery. Such boundless death. All due to her words.

  Then a thin Bahiri man knelt and took her hands. "Grey Girl," he said, his eyes shining. "I have to . . . my name is Shaviid, I . . ." Words failed him. He set a hand to the dying man's chest instead. Soft worship tumbled from his lips.

  The man's breathing evened. His wound closed.

  Lyseira gasped, wrung by twin fists of hope and disbelief.

  A man in black boots came forward, nervous but resolved. "Grey Girl," he said. "Let me." And he, too, prayed, returning life and hope to one who had fallen.

  She sank backward, leaning against her hands, dumbstruck.

  Sobbing.

  Another came to her, touched her shoulder, and moved past to pray. Then another. And ano
ther, as the world spun and her emotions reeled. How many? she breathed. How many hiding, too frightened to answer God's call?

  Many, her Father said. And they are ready. Hungry. Body and mind.

  Feed them, daughter.

  Feed them all.

  32

  i. Isaic

  She's so young, he thought. Seventeen summers, the people said, and while her youth was plain enough to see, it didn't touch her eyes. An old soul, perhaps, his mother whispered. Like you.

  Young or not, he couldn't deny her influence. The people flocked to her. They loved her. It had been just two days since the riots had finally quieted, the last priest murdered or run out of town, and already a group followed her everywhere—many of them witches in their own right.

  Not witches, he remembered. Not clerics, not chanters. Kesprey. That was what she called them; the name they had taken for themselves.

  He glanced at Melakai. Look what it took to expel the Church, the man had said to him yesterday. I'm not sure how I feel about propping up a new one in its place.

  I understand, Isaic had returned. I don't like it either. But it doesn't matter. I have to move quickly.

  Now Kai gave him a barely perceptible nod. Other than the two of them, Lyseira and her bodyguard brother were the only people in the marble receiving room—the room where, days earlier, Harad had given his life.

  "Please, have a seat." Isaic gestured at the open chairs. Lyseira obliged him; Seth, like Melakai, kept his feet. "Thank you, again," Isaic started, "for saving my life in the square."

  Lyseira nodded, nervous. The room intimidated her, he could tell; she wasn't accustomed to such opulence, nor to speaking with royalty.

  But he wasn't royalty anymore. They had stripped him of that. He was . . . what? A spoiled rich boy? Or even less—nothing at all? The entire city had heard the Church deny his birthright. He could go on pretending it hadn't happened, but if he had learned any lessons this year, they had been the value of two things: loyalty, and law.