36
The Thirteenth Kill
Goddard was in the chapel sanctuary finishing the last of his terrible business. Outside the wails began to fade as Rand and Chomsky finished what they had begun. A building was burning across the courtyard. Smoke and cold air poured in through the broken stained glass windows of the chapel. Goddard stood at the front, by an altar that featured a shining two-pronged fork and a stone bowl of dirty water.
There was only one Tonist left alive in the chapel. He was a balding man, wearing a frock that was slightly different from the dead around him. Goddard held him with one hand and wielded his sword in the other. Then Goddard turned to see Rowan and smiled.
“Ah, Rowan! Just in time,” he said cheerily. “I’ve saved the curate for you.”
The Tonist curate showed defiance rather than fear. “What you’ve done here today will only help our cause,” he said. “Martyrs testify far more effectively than the living.”
“Martyrs to what?” Goddard sneered and tapped his blade against the huge tuning fork. “To this thing? I’d laugh if I wasn’t so disgusted.”
Rowan strode closer, ignoring the carnage around him, focusing in on Goddard. “Let him go,” Rowan said.
“Why? Do you prefer a moving target?”
“I prefer no target.”
Finally Goddard understood. He grinned, as if Rowan had just said something charming and quaint. “Does our young man express a wee bit of disapproval?”
“Volta’s dead,” Rowan told him.
Goddard’s gleeful expression faded, but only a bit. “He was attacked by the Tonists? They’ll pay dearly for it!”
“It wasn’t them.” Rowan didn’t even try to hide the animosity in his voice. “He gleaned himself.”
This gave Goddard pause. The curate struggled in his grip, and Goddard slammed him against the stone basin hard enough to knock him out, then let the man fall to the ground.
“Volta was the weakest of us,” Goddard said. “I’m not entirely surprised. Once you’re ordained, I will happily have you take his place.”
“I won’t do that.”
Goddard took a moment to gauge Rowan. To read him. It felt like a violation. Goddard was in his head—even deeper; in his soul—and Rowan didn’t know how to cast him out.
“I know you and Alessandro were close, but he was nothing like you, Rowan, believe me. He never had the hunger. But you do. I’ve seen it in your eyes. I’ve seen how you are when you train. Living in the moment. Every kill perfect.”
Rowan found he couldn’t look away from Goddard, who had put down his sword and now held his hands out as if his were the inviting embrace of a savior. The diamonds in his robe twinkled in the faraway firelight, so bedazzling.
“We could have been called reapers,” Goddard said, “but our founders saw fit to call us scythes—because we are the weapons in mankind’s immortal hand. You are a fine weapon, Rowan, sharp, and precise. And when you strike, you are glorious to behold.”
“Stop it! That’s not true!”
“You know it is. You were born for this, Rowan. Don’t throw it away.”
The curate began to groan, beginning to regain consciousness. Goddard hauled him to his feet. “Glean him, Rowan. Don’t fight it. Glean him now. And enjoy it.”
Rowan tightened the grip on his blade as he looked into the curate’s bleary, half-conscious eyes. Even as he tried to stand his ground, Rowan couldn’t deny the power of the undertow. “You’re a monster!” he shouted. “The worst kind, because you don’t just kill, you turn others into killers like yourself.”
“You just lack perspective. The predator is always a monster to the prey. To the gazelle the lion is a demon. To a mouse, the eagle is evil incarnate.” He took a step closer, the curate still held tightly in his grip.
“Will you be the eagle or the mouse, Rowan? Will you soar or will you scurry away? For those are the only two choices today.”
Rowan’s head was swimming. The smell of blood and the smoke pouring in through the shattered windows made him dizzy and muddled his thoughts. The curate looked no different than the strangers he practiced on every day—and for a moment, he felt himself out on the lawn in the middle of a killcraft exercise. Rowan unsheathed his sword and stalked forward, feeling the hunger, living in the moment, just as Goddard had said, and allowing himself to feel that hunger was freeing in a way Rowan couldn’t describe. For many months he had trained for this, and now he finally understood why Goddard always let the last one go before Rowan could strike, stopping him one blow short of completion.
It was to prepare him for today.
Today he would finally have that completion, and every day henceforth, when he went out to glean, he would not stay his hand or his blade or his bullet until there was no one left to glean.
Before he could think it through, before his mind could tell him to stop, he launched himself toward the curate, and thrust his blade forward with all of his force, finally achieving that exquisite completion.
The man gasped and stumbled aside, the blade having missed him completely.
Instead, Rowan’s blade hit its true mark, and ran Scythe Goddard through, all the way to the hilt.
Rowan was close to Goddard now. Inches from his face, looking into his wide, shocked eyes.
“I am what you made me,” he told Goddard. “And you’re right: I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that more than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” Then with his free hand, Rowan reached down and yanked the ring off Goddard’s finger. “You don’t deserve to wear this. You never did.”
Goddard opened his mouth to speak—perhaps to deliver an eloquent death soliloquy—but Rowan didn’t want to hear anything from him anymore, so he stepped back, withdrew his sword from Goddard’s gut, and swung it in a broad, sweeping arc that took off Goddard’s head in a single blow. It tumbled and landed in the basin of dirty water, as if that were what the basin was there for.
The rest of Goddard’s body fell limply to the ground, and in the silence of the moment, Rowan heard from behind him:
“What the hell did you do?”
Rowan turned and saw Chomsky standing at the entrance of the chapel, with Rand beside him.
“You are so gleaned when he’s revived!”
Rowan let his training take over. I am the weapon, he told himself. And in that moment he was a lethal one. Chomsky and Rand defended themselves against him, and although they were good, they were nothing compared to a weapon so sharp and precise as he. Rowan’s blade cut Rand deep, but she kicked the sword out of his hand with a well-placed Bokator kick. Rowan responded with an even more effective kick that broke her spine. Chomsky set Rowan’s arm ablaze with the flamethrower, but Rowan rolled on the ground, putting it out, then grabbed the toning mallet from beside the altar and brought it down on Chomsky like the hammer of Thor, striking again and again and again as if he were toning the hour, until the curate grabbed his hand to stop him and said, “That’s enough, son. He’s dead.”
Rowan dropped the mallet. Only now did he allow himself to let down his guard.
“Come with me, son,” the man said. “There’s a place for you with us. We can hide you from the Scythedom.”
Rowan looked at the man’s outstretched hand, but even now Goddard’s words came back to him. The eagle or the mouse? No, Rowan would not scurry away and hide. There was still more that had to be done.
“Leave here,” he told the man. “Find the survivors, if there are any, and get out—but do it quickly.”
The man looked at him for a moment more, then turned and left the chapel. Once he was gone, Rowan picked up the flamethrower and got down to business.
• • •
Out in the street, fire trucks had already pulled up and peace officers were holding back crowds. The entire cloister was now on fire, and although firefighters raced toward the blaze, they were intercepted by a young man stepping out of the main gate.
“This is a scythe action. You will not intervene,” he said.
The fire captain who now approached him had heard of scythe-related fires, but never had such a thing happened on his watch. There was something about this that didn’t seem right. Yes, the boy appeared to be wearing a scythe’s robe—a royal blue one, studded with diamonds—but the robe clearly didn’t fit him. With flames consuming the compound at an alarming rate, the captain made a judgment call. This kid, whoever he was, was no scythe, and was not about to hinder their efforts.
“Out of the way!” he told the kid dismissively “Get back with the others and let us do our job.”
Then the kid moved with lightning speed. The captain felt his legs kicked out from under him. He landed on his back, and suddenly the kid was on top of him, a knee painfully pressed into the captain’s chest and a hand around his throat squeezing so tightly it almost closed off his windpipe. Suddenly the boy didn’t seem a boy at all. He seemed a whole lot bigger. A whole lot older.
“I SAID THIS IS A SCYTHE ACTION AND YOU WILL NOT INTERVENE, OR I WILL GLEAN YOU RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!”
The fire captain now knew he had made a grievous mistake. No one but a scythe could be so commanding and take such absolute control of a situation. “Yes, Your Honor,” the captain rasped. “I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
The scythe stood, letting the captain get up. He told his squad to fall back, and the squad, having seen the scythe take their captain down so effectively, didn’t question it.
“You can protect other buildings that are threatened,” the young scythe said, “but you’ll let this entire compound burn to the ground.”
“I understand, Your Honor.”
Then the scythe held up his ring, and the captain kissed it with such force, he cracked a tooth.
• • •
Rowan felt his skin crawling beneath Scythe Goddard’s blood-soaked robe, but as unpleasant as it was, he needed it to play the part. He was far more convincing than he thought he’d be. He frightened himself.
The firefighters now directed all their attention to adjacent buildings, hosing down nearby roofs with fire retardant. Rowan found himself standing alone between the burning Tonist cloister and the crowds still held back by peace officers. He stayed until the steeple caved in and the giant fork at its apex plunged into the flames, resounding with a mournful clang as it hit the ground.
I have become the monster of monsters, he thought as he watched it all burn. The butcher of lions. The executioner of eagles.
Then, trying not to trip over the robe, Rowan strode away from the all-consuming inferno that would leave nothing behind of Scythe Goddard and his disciples but bones too charred to ever be revived.