Firebrand

Grandmother put her hands up, palms outward, as though to stem its advance. “I simply called you, requested aid.”

“You forced me from my domain, witch, and it has been the ruin of me. And now I will break the binding.”

“No, no. Please, let us come to some accommodation.” She fumbled in her pouch for any stray bit of yarn she could lay her fingers on, but another fierce gust blew it out of her hands. “We can help one another!” Her lips were numb, her cheeks burning from the cold.

“Enough!” The chamber seemed to shake with the aureas slee’s voice. Its hand grew into a long sword of ice, and it thrust the blade into her gut, and twisted.

Grandmother looked down at herself as the ice blade, smeared with her own blood, was withdrawn from her midsection. She was more aghast than anything that it should all end this way. She had been so close to using the avatar’s command of the dead and mirror eye to defeat the lands for Second Empire. As everything went cold inside her and she spilled to the chamber’s floor, she wondered how her people would go on without her, who would make sure Lala buttoned up her coat on cold winter days, who would lead her people?

Blood, hot in contrast to everything else, flowed over her fingers splayed over her wound. She could not hold in the blood. She saw only melting puddles of snow, and that the aureas slee had already left.

Help, she tried to say, but no word came out. She tried reaching for the slaves across the chamber, but she could not lift her hand.

As her sight dimmed, she saw that her descent into death had weakened the spell that bound the avatar. The avatar forced herself to her feet and shredded the strands of magic, and freed herself. She regained her sword, pushed her visor back in place, and staggered to where Grandmother lay and stared down at her.

“You cannot hurt me,” Grandmother whispered.

The avatar did not speak, but even as Grandmother’s world faded away, she heard the unmistakable downbeats of Westrion’s wings.

No! You are not my god!

When her spirit left her body, the avatar loomed large and bright and winged before her, beautiful and terrible, truly the dark angel. The sword of silver fire pointed at the Aeon Iire, the seal that covered the portal to the deepest, most malignant of hells in the theology of the Sacoridians, reserved for the worst of the worst.

“That is not my hell,” Grandmother the spirit said. “I deserve paradise for all I have done for my people. I do not believe in your—”

“Go.”

The avatar’s voice was both terrifying and majestic, and its power forced Grandmother toward the seal. Her will was no longer her own.

“Go,” the avatar commanded once more. “You are judged. May that which you inflicted upon others be visited upon you with no end. I sentence you to an eternity of torment for your crimes. Go.”

Grandmother felt her incorporeal self dragged and sucked through the iire. Darkness scrabbled around her and shrieked its shrill delight.

RAGE

After the attack of the demons, Zachary observed that something had changed in the attitude of Second Empire’s forces. Despite having the advantage of cover in the keep, their defense crumbled. Now that the demons harried them no longer, the soldiers of the River Unit swarmed through breaks in the curtain wall, Fiori with them. Other combatants fought in small clutches before the main entrance of the curtain wall, Zachary among them. He eagerly traded blows with one of the better swordsmen.

“I know you,” his opponent said breathlessly. “You’re the—”

Zachary slashed through his neck before he could say more, almost beheading him. He turned to take on another enemy, but they were few, and they were engaged. He stood there in the snow squall, his heart pounding, his blood singing in readiness for more slaughter, but all else—the din of battle, the storm, the stench of blood—fell away, grew remote, slowed down. Snowflakes hung in the air.

The avatar and her stallion reappeared. They gleamed of starshine and silver fire, the stallion’s muscles rippling like ebon silk as he tossed his head and pawed at the snow. Flurries gyred gently around them, did not touch them.

And then, as though Zachary lost time, the stallion was simply no longer there, and the avatar stood upon the ground. Her armor, he saw, had been breached and silver-green luminescence bled through perforations in the steel. She tilted her head back and shed radiance—pure and cold and searing—as first her helm disintegrated in a cloud of coruscating particles, and then her armor, leaving behind his Green Rider.

Karigan? Karigan was the avatar? But of course she was.

The brilliant light faded at last, and normal time resumed, the snow falling furiously, and she stood there unarmed and wavering. He started to go to her, but someone launched out of the dark and grabbed her, held a weapon against her throat. Zachary ran forward, his sword ready in his hand.

“No closer!” Immerez shouted. It was his hook, sharpened to a cruel point, that he dug into Karigan’s flesh. “If you come any closer, I’ll rip her throat out.”

The rage surged through Zachary so that he trembled in the effort to control himself, to keep himself from leaping across the space between them. Normally, he knew, Karigan would have defended herself if she could, but she was still weak from her wounds, and who knew what being the avatar might have done to her.

“You can’t escape,” Zachary shouted.

“I can and I will.” Immerez jerked Karigan along as he backed away. Her soft cry made Zachary’s heart pound harder. He was only peripherally aware of another standing by his side. “I will take her and—”