39
Uncanny Enemies
Trees that should have been dead. Movement where there should have been stillness. A figure in the doorway of a long-abandoned citadel.
Where there ought to have been naught but desertion and old death, there was . . . her.
Lazlo’s first instinct was to doubt he was awake. The goddess of despair was dead and he was dreaming. But he knew the latter, at least, wasn’t true. He felt Eril-Fane’s sudden stillness, saw his great hand freeze on his hilt, his hreshtek but half drawn. Azareen’s wasn’t. It came free with a deadly shink!
All this was periphery. Lazlo couldn’t turn aside to see. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
She had red flowers in her hair. Her eyes were wide and desperate. Her voice, it carved a tunnel through the air. It was rough and scouring, like rusty anchor chain reeling through a hawse. She was struggling. Hands caught at her from within. Whose hands? She gripped the sides of the doorway, but the mesarthium was smooth; there was no frame, nothing to give her purchase, and there were too many hands, grabbing at her arms and hair and shoulders. She had nothing to hold on to.
Lazlo wanted to leap to her defense. Their eyes met. The look was like the scorch of lightning. Her scouring cry still echoed—Go!—and then she was gone, ripped back into the citadel.
As others came pouring out.
Soulzeren had, in the instant of the cry, reversed thrust on the sleigh, sending it scudding gently backward. “Gently” was its only speed, except under sail with a good stiff breeze. Lazlo stood rooted, experiencing the full meaning of useless as a wave of enemies hurtled toward them, moving with uncanny fluidity, flying at them as though launched. He had no sword to draw, and nothing to do but stand and watch. Eril-Fane and Azareen stood squarely before him and Soulzeren, guarding them from this impossible onslaught. Too many, too swift. They boiled like bees from a hive. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing. They were coming. They were fast.
They were here.
Steel on steel. The sound—a skreek—cut straight to his hearts. He couldn’t stand empty-handed—useless—in such a storm of steel. There were no extra weapons. There was nothing but the padded pole Soulzeren kept for pushing the sleigh clear of obstacles when maneuvering to a landing. He grabbed it and faced the fray.
The attackers had knives, not swords—kitchen knives—and their shortened reach brought them well inside the warriors’ strike zone. If they were ordinary foes, it might have been possible to defend against them with great broad slashes that gutted two or three at a time. But they weren’t ordinary foes. It was plain to see they weren’t soldiers at all. They were men and women of all ages, some white-haired, and some not even yet adults.
Eril-Fane and Azareen were deflecting blows, sending kitchen knives skittering over the metal surface of the terrace that was still beneath the sleigh. Azareen gasped at the sight of one old woman, and Lazlo noted the way her sword arm fell limp to her side. “Nana?” she said, stunned, and he watched, unblinking, horrified, as the woman raised a mallet—the studded metal sort for pounding cutlets—and brought it arcing down right at Azareen’s head.
There was no conscious thought in it. Lazlo’s arms did the thinking. He brought the pole up, and just in time. The mallet smashed into it, and it smashed into Azareen. He couldn’t prevent it. The force of the blow—immense for an old woman!—was too great. But the pole was padded with batting and canvas, and it stopped Azareen’s skull from being staved in. Her sword arm jerked back to life. She knocked the pole away and shook her head to clear it, and Lazlo saw . . .
He saw her blade cut right through the old woman’s arm—right through—and . . . nothing happened. The arm, her substance, it simply . . . rearranged itself around the weapon and became whole again after it had passed through. There wasn’t even blood.
It all came clear. These enemies were not mortal, and they could not be harmed.
The realization struck them all, just at the moment that the sleigh glided finally free of the terrace and back into open sky, widening the distance from the metal hand and the army of the dead it held.
There was a feeling of escape, a moment to gasp for breath.
But it was false. The attackers kept coming. They vaulted off the terrace, mindless of the distance. They leapt into the open sky and . . . failed to fall.
There was no escape. The attackers crashed onto the sleigh. Ghosts poured from the angel’s huge metal hand, wielding knives and meat hooks, and the Tizerkane fought them off blow by blow. Lazlo stood between the warriors and Soulzeren, wielding the pole. An attacker slipped around the side—a man with a mustache—and Lazlo cut him in half with a swing, only to watch the halves of him re-form like something from a nightmare. The trick was the weapons, he thought, remembering the mallet. He struck again with the pole, aiming for the man’s hand, and knocked the knife from his grip. It clattered to the floor of the sleigh.
This unnatural army was entirely untrained, but what did that matter? There was no end to them, and they could not die. What is skill in such a fight?
The ghost with the mustache, unarmed now, launched at Soulzeren, and Lazlo thrust himself between them. The ghost grabbed for the pole. Lazlo held on. They grappled. Behind the figure he could see all the rest of them—the swarm of them with their blank faces and staring, harrowed eyes, and he couldn’t wrest the pole free. The ghost’s strength was unnatural. He wouldn’t tire. Lazlo was helpless when the next attacker slipped around the Tizerkane’s guard. A young woman with haunted eyes. A meat hook in her hands.
She raised it. Brought it down . . .
. . . on the starboard pontoon, puncturing it. The sleigh lurched. Soulzeren cried out. Gas hissed through the hole, and the sleigh began to spin.
It was at just this moment, when it occurred to Lazlo that he was going to die—exactly as he had been warned, impossibly, in a dream—that the ghost he was grappling with . . . lost solidity. Lazlo saw his hands, one moment so hard and real on the wood of the pole, melt right through it. The same thing happened to the young woman. The meat hook fell from her grip, though she never loosed her hold on it. It fell right through her hand and into the sleigh. And then the strangest thing. A look of sweetest, purest relief came over her face, even as she began to fade from sight. Lazlo could see through her. She closed her eyes and smiled and was gone. The man with the mustache was next. An instant and his face lost its blankness, flushed with the delirium of release, and then he vanished, too. The ghosts were melting. They had gone beyond some boundary and been set free.
Not all of them were so lucky. Most were sucked backward like kites on strings, reeled back to the metal hand to watch as the sleigh, spinning slowly, scudded farther and farther out of their reach.
No time to wonder. The starboard pontoon was leaking gas. The sleigh was keeling over. “Lazlo,” barked Soulzeren, pushing her goggles up onto her forehead. “Shift your weight to port, and hold on.”
He did as she commanded, his weight balancing the tilt of the craft as she slapped a patch onto the hissing hole the meat hook had made. The weapon still lay on the floor, dull and deadly, and the knife that had fallen there, too. Azareen and Eril-Fane were gasping for breath, their hreshteks still drawn, shoulders heaving. They checked each other frantically for injuries. Both were bleeding from cuts to their hands and arms, but that was all. Amazingly, no one had sustained a serious injury.
Drawing a deep breath, Azareen turned to Lazlo. “You saved my life, faranji.”
Lazlo almost said, “You’re welcome,” but she hadn’t actually thanked him, so he held it back and only nodded. He hoped it was a dignified nod, maybe even a little tough. He doubted it, though. His hands were shaking.
His everything was shaking.
The sleigh had stopped its spinning, but was still listing. They’d lost just enough gas for a slow descent. Soulzeren raised the sail and sheeted it, bringing the bow around and aiming for the meadows outside the city walls.
That was good. It would give them time to catch their breath before the others could reach them. The thought of the others, and all the questions they would ask, jolted Lazlo out of his survival euphoria and back into reality. Questions. Questions required answers. What were the answers? He looked to Eril-Fane. “What just happened?” he asked.
The Godslayer stood a good while with his hands on the rail, leaning heavily, looking away. Lazlo couldn’t see his face, but he could read his shoulders. Something very heavy was pressing there. Very heavy indeed. He thought of the girl on the terrace, the girl from the dream, and asked, “Was that Isagol?”
“No,” said Eril-Fane, sharp. “Isagol is dead.”
Then . . . who? Lazlo might have asked more, but Azareen caught his eye and warned him off with a look. She was badly shaken.
They were silent for the rest of the descent. The landing was soft as a whisper, the craft skimming over the tall grass until Soulzeren dropped the sail and they came at last to a halt. Lazlo helped her secure it, and they climbed back onto the surface of the world. They were out from under the citadel here. The sun was bright, and the crisp line of shadow, downhill, made a visible border.
Against that harsh line where darkness began, Lazlo caught a glimpse of the white bird, wheeling and tilting. It was always there, he thought. Always watching.
“They’ll get here soon, I reckon,” said Soulzeren. She pulled off her goggles and wiped her brow with her arm. “Ozwin won’t tarry.”
The Godslayer nodded. He was silent another moment, collecting himself, before he picked up the dropped knife and meat hook from the floor of the silk sleigh and hurled them away. He drew a hard breath and spoke. “I won’t order you to lie,” he said slowly. “But I’m asking you to. I’m asking that we keep this to ourselves. Until I can think what to do about it.”
It? The ghosts? The girl? This utter upending of what the citizens of Weep thought they knew about the citadel they already feared with such cold, debilitating dread? What manner of dread would this new truth inspire? Lazlo shuddered to think of it.
“We can’t . . . we can’t simply do nothing,” said Azareen.
“I know,” said Eril-Fane, ravaged. “But if we tell, there will be panic. And if we try to attack . . .” He swallowed. “Azareen, did you see?”
“Of course I did,” she whispered. Her words were so raw. She hugged her arms around herself. Lazlo thought they should have been Eril-Fane’s arms. Even he could see that. But Eril-Fane was trapped in his own shock and grief, and kept his great arms to himself.
“Who were they?” Soulzeren asked. “What were they?”
Slowly, like a dancer dropping into a curtsy that keeps going all the way to the ground, Azareen sank down onto the grass. “All our dead,” she said. “Turned against us.” Her eyes were hard and bright.
Lazlo turned to Eril-Fane. “Did you know?” he asked him. “When we were taking off, I asked if you were certain it was empty, and you said ‘Empty of the living.’ ”
Eril-Fane closed his eyes. He rubbed them. “I didn’t mean . . . ghosts,” he said, stumbling on the word. “I meant bodies.” He seemed almost to be hiding his face in his hands, and Lazlo knew there were still secrets.
“But the girl,” he said, tentative. “She was neither.”
Eril-Fane dropped his hands from his eyes. “No.” With anguish and a stark glimmer of . . . something—redemption?—he whispered, “She’s alive.”