Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 30

Ashok watched Thera fall.

“NO!”

He ran toward where she’d disappeared from sight behind the horde of demons.

They rushed him. Angruvadal sliced them into pieces. Claws caught hold of his shoulder and one demon tried to pull him down. He grabbed that demon’s mighty arm, and with a strength born of desperation twisted it until iron-dense bone snapped. Ashok cleaved it from neck to pelvis and barely slowed. He collided with demons and hurled them away. A giant crashed toward him, but Ashok slid beneath it on his knees, opened its belly with Angruvadal, then on the other side leapt back up and kept running.

“Thera!”

Behind him guns roared as his Fortress gunners opened fire. Ashok kept pushing forward, ripping through demons as if they were made of paper. Limbs and heads were sent flying. He kicked a thousand-pound demon in the chest hard enough to launch it back through a brick wall.

The base of the tower came into sight and upon the stones there…Thera lay broken.

Ashok stopped. Amid a garden of dead casteless, the woman he loved was sprawled, bones shattered, blood pooling.

He’d killed well over a thousand men in battle and hundreds more as their executioner. Ashok understood death far too well for it to ever deceive him. He knew death, because he had been death’s greatest servant, and death’s truth stabbed him in the eyes.

She was gone.

Ashok stood there. Numb. Trembling. Blinking. Uncomprehending.

Kule had stolen his fear, but he’d left behind everything else. His guilt. His grief. Ashok had thought he’d known what pain was, but that had been a lie. That had been a shadow of real pain. A hook through the heart had been a sliver in comparison to what he experienced in that horrible moment. Dying hurt so much less than this.

Thera is dead.

The ultimate Protector had failed to protect the most important thing of all.

Atop the tower, a dark god waited, aloof.

Ashok looked toward the Grand Inquisitor, then back at Thera’s body, then back up at the twisted Law-faced thing who had murdered her. His grip tightened around Angruvadal, so hard that even black steel creaked.

Kule had taken his fear, but Omand had just filled that void with something far more dangerous. Beyond suffering, beyond loss, beyond even hate…there lived rage. Not of fire, but cold, crueler and more unforgiving than the glacier ice that concealed the Heart of the Mountain.

With the shard in his chest burning with such intensity that the black light bled through his skin and shone through the gaps in his armor, Ashok started toward the tower’s stairs.

Four demons attacked at once. Ashok barely even noticed them. Four demons promptly died.

But before he could ascend the stairway to vengeance, the king of demons hit Ashok with the entire world.

It came from nowhere, fast as lighting, to strike him across the chest. Ashok tumbled and skidded across the ground, rolling through the spilled blood of many casteless, to crash against a great foundation stone hard enough to crack it in two.

Angruvadal had not predicted that attack, for even mighty Ramrowan had never fought this thing in person. But encoded in the black steel was a warning about this particular demon, for the gods had known of its existence even before the swords had been forged.

During the great war that had raged across the world and sky this beast had hidden itself beneath the sea to avoid the fiery arrows of Upagraha and her sisters. Just as Ashok’s ancient ancestor, Ramrowan, had the blood of the gods pumping through his veins, this demon had a touch of its creator, the gods’ eternal enemy, seared into its makeup. That dark empire had created the demons to challenge gods and man, but this one in particular they had fashioned in their own image to lead the others. It had been designed as the dark counterpart to Ramrowan’s light and imbued with some of the power of its masters. If this beast had been free to stalk the land back then, even man’s greatest hero would have likely fallen before it, and mankind would have been eradicated, for this being was the living embodiment of demonic malice.

The ancients had given it a name, called after a legend that haunted their nightmares…Rakshasa…and the shard warned him that this was the most dangerous creature that had ever been, or ever would be.

But it was standing between Ashok and avenging Thera, so none of that mattered.

Calling upon a connection to the Heart of the Mountain that was stronger than ever before, Ashok’s many broken bones knitted back together rapidly, and he stood.

The master demon waited.

“Offense has been taken.” Ashok pointed Angruvadal toward the top of the tower. “Against him. But your existence has offended the entire world, so I will have to kill you first.”

The Rakshasa’s answer was to bend down and pick up an arm that Ashok had sliced from one of its soldiers. That limb glowed, then seemed to melt and flow into a new form as the demon worked some perverse spell upon it. Ashok had not been aware that demons had wizards. Nor had he ever seen a demon wield a weapon before, but when the spell was complete the limb had reformed into a spear made of flowing green fire. Bits of liquid slid off, dripping like molten metal in a workers’ foundry, and when those globs hit the stones they immediately began to burn through.

It charged.

So did Ashok.

It was two whirlwinds clashing as demon spear met black steel. Fire scorched the metal of Ashok’s armor as Angruvadal crossed a weapon that burned with the heat of the sun. Angruvadal absorbed enough of the intensity to keep Ashok from combusting, but cloth charred and the casteless blood he was coated in bubbled and blackened.

The demon pushed him back, spear spinning too fast for the eye to track. The strikes flew at him, but Ashok kept parrying them or narrowly dodging aside. Each time he countered, the Rakshasa did the same. It was too strong, too incomprehensibly fast. Yet somehow, in a holy combination of magic and fury, Ashok matched that intensity, and gave back even more.

Other demons fought with might and savagery. This one had those traits in greater quantity than any demon Ashok had met before, plus a martial skill that would make a Protector jealous. Just as black steel contained generations of instinct about how to fight, the Rakshasa had similar information coded to its bones about how best to defeat humans.

The two combatants moved back and forth, constantly attacking and weaving. Around them the plants of the garden wilted and caught fire. Their weapons were moving so fast that the wind of their passing tore all the leaves from the trees, swirling gold and red, the colors of Fall, as the casteless had named him.

The spear never stopped flashing, each end a deadly point, as the demon effortlessly shifted it between four different hands. Ashok met each, as Angruvadal was a seamless extension of his will. When either weapon clipped stone, it sliced through clean.

The Rakshasa drew first blood, as the tip of the spear burned across Ashok’s chest, ripping a jagged line through the steel of his breastplate, but it took no triumph from that, as Angruvadal promptly caught one of its arms and opened a milk-white gash. As it drew back, he clipped it again, shallow, across the hip, cutting through the hide that held its belt of trophy skulls, scattering yellowed bones across the ground.

Ashok did not know whose heads this demon had seen fit to collect, but he would avenge them too. The human ones, at least.

They parted, circling. The ragged tear across Ashok’s armor glowed red from the heat. The skin beneath charred and split. The smell of his own flesh roasting assaulted Ashok’s nostrils. Boiling blood and burning hair. The pain was unbearable.

Until he caught another glimpse of Thera, and then it was nothing.

The Rakshasa stepped aside to make room for one of the titanic demons to try and run Ashok down. The garden shook as the giant rushed him. From the way it left a trail of white behind it, this was the one whose bowels Ashok had split open.

But before Ashok had to dive out of the big one’s way, he saw Shekar Somsak sprinting alongside it, unnoticed by the giant. The wick was almost burned down on the Fortress bomb in Shekar’s hand. With an incredible burst of speed, Shekar got in front of it and drove the clay jug deep into the giant’s guts, but he paid for that audacity by being smashed beneath a massive foot.

The giant exploded.

White blood and demon meat were flung in every direction.

The giant toppled, skidding forward, plowing up plumes of dirt, until its head stopped inches from Ashok’s boot. Fortress smoke spilled from its burst-asunder side and out its open mouth.

The lord of demons fell through the plume of smoke, slashing.

Angruvadal turned aside the flaming spear at the last instant, and then the two of them went rolling across the ground, through puddles of casteless blood. Ashok leapt back to his feet as the Rakshasa used its extra arms to launch itself back upright. They traded a dozen blows in the span of two heartbeats, and this time black steel bit deep.

They broke away, and the demon raised one of its hands to probe the deep laceration across its blank face. It was as expressionless as every other spawn of the sea, but surely that cut had surprised it. Just as Ashok possessed no instinct about how to fight such an unknown threat, it too had no knowledge sufficient to predict his actions, for no man had ever been as dangerous as this one. Even Ramrowan had not been devoted enough to become a hybrid of black steel and flesh.

However, the Rakshasa still remained far stronger than even the Heart and shard could make him, so it went at him, relentless.

Each impact of the spear hit with a crack of thunder, louder than a Fortress cannon. When it struck the ground where Ashok had just been, it threw up clouds of dirt and left behind craters. Ashok moved through those clouds to strike at the demon’s legs, but demons had no eyes to blind, so it anticipated and jumped over his swings, striking at him from above.

Ashok blocked, but green fire spilled across his helmet. Steel melted and seared the side of his face. The demon landed, spun the staff overhead, and brought it down hard. He managed to intercept it with Angruvadal’s guard, but that left the demon with two other hands free, which it used to pummel his torso. Each fist hit like Karno’s war hammer. Ribs broke. Organs ruptured. Ashok threw his weight forward and kicked the Rakshasa in the leg with all his might. He might as well have been kicking a steel rod for all the good that did.

Its free hands grabbed hold of Ashok’s armor, spun him hard, and sent him flying back through the garden and across the courtyard, to slam against the artisans’ tower hard enough to break his spine.

He landed on his back, next to Thera’s body.

Ashok lay there, crippled, commanding the Heart of the Mountain to perform its healing work. Even as a twenty-year Senior Protector, such an injury would probably have killed him immediately, and if it hadn’t, it would have taken him days, if not weeks to recover. This time the ancient magic mended his shattered spine back together in a matter of seconds.

This draw was not without cost. He could not see it, but somehow he knew that in distant Devakula, a crack appeared through the Heart of the Mountain.

Even with that incredible expenditure of ancient magic, the Rakshasa was on its way to finish him, and then everyone would die.

Directly above, the golden mask of the Law glared down upon him in judgment. Thera was beside him, one bloody hand extended as if reaching out to him. Ashok placed his shaking hand atop her still one, which had been forever scarred from once holding the fiery might of the gods in her mortal hands.

“Forgive me, Thera.”

The Rakshasa arrived expecting a dead man, but Ashok rose before it, took up the fighting stance taught to him by sword master Ratul, and raised Angruvadal high.

If a demon could speak, it would have asked How?

They clashed there for the final time, with his dead wife, a dark god, a band of warriors, and a horde of demons as their witnesses.

The spear came sweeping around in a flashing arc, Angruvadal met it. The shock of the impact shook centuries of dust from the tower. Again and again, the Rakshasa struck. It went high. Ashok went low. When it tried to entangle him with its extra hands, Ashok smote one off at the wrist.

It stopped to look at the stump, as if puzzled. The Rakshasa knew it should have killed him by now, but somehow this adversary refused to die. Ashok knew the Heart of the Mountain neared destruction as every Protector assembled here today used it to fight past the limits of human capability, and Ashok by himself drew might sufficient from that dying artifact to challenge gods.

But more than that, it felt as if Thera was aiding him from beyond.

A strange light began to shine around the base of the artisans’ tower. An eerie stillness descended over the courtyard as a glowing mist rose from the ground about them.

The Voice was here.

But this was not like before. The Voice had not come to dispense some prophecy to guide its servants. This was a wrathful god freed, come to collect retribution.

As the fog thickened, the puddles of spilled blood began to shake, and then flew upward, as droplets broke free and floated up into the air, like a reverse rain. The fog gradually turned the color of congealed blood. Lines of stark golden light pierced the mist and lingered there to sear the eye as an ancient magical pattern was revealed, words and images, expanding in size and complexity, unfurling, a fractal growth, a mandala of retribution. As the whole world began to tremble, every dead body, human and demon both, levitated from the ground, lifted up by whatever blood remained inside.

Unleashed from the body that had carried it for so long, the Voice was seeking out the blood of Ramrowan and the secret weapon hidden within.

The Rakshasa realized it was too late, and as one, the demon army began to run back toward the river, wading through the bloody fog.

The pattern was complete. The spell was cast. Reality itself jolted as a tiny bit of the world was unmade.

Millions of the suspended blood droplets ruptured.

No one living had ever heard a demon scream in pain before.

Until now.


Back | Next
Framed