Advertisement
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- Hanno led the assault without looking at the sorcerer’s duel echoing across the valleys. He would trust in Antigone, that she was the match of the Warlock and would allow no harm to come to them. He’d acted to ensure that much, by sending all other heroes to the northern valley. With only he and the Witch present, Creation’s grooves would not be filled with a plethora different stories that all weakened each other by allowing none to be come into the fullness of being. The Witch of the Woods would fight the Warlock. The White Knight would fight the Black Knight. The clarity of this would be as dangerous a blade as the one in his hand. In the Twin above engines and crossbows spewed death at the advancing crusaders, checked only by the shields of mages and the fences of priests. Praesi sorceries lashed at them both, tearing holes that were filled with steel and stone with eerie coordination. It did not matter. With him at their head, the crusaders roared and advanced. Sword bright with the Light, the White Knight pushed through storms of fire and clouds of poison. They dispersed like mist under the sun. Darkness fell in a rain of needles, men they pierced convulsing in violent throes, but Hanno screamed his challenge and they shattered like glass.
- “Carrion Lord,” he yelled as in the sky above lightning fought spinning lights. “I summon you, Black Knight.”
- His words rang like a thunderclap across the valley. A gauntlet thrown, and not easily refused. Not without consequences greater than whispers of cowardice. A duel of champions for Above and Below was an ancient thing, and not disdained without earning the same disdain from the Gods. The gates of barded steel and iron at the foot of the tower slowly opened. Out came a silhouette riding a dead horse. His plate was simple and worn, his lance a thing of blackened steel and the sword at his hip goblin-wrought steel. As he rode a dark cloak streamed behind him. The helm, as always, hid his face save for eerie green eyes and hints of pallid skin. Bringing up his shield, the Black Knight moved as the gates closed in his wake. Hanno felt it, the cold thing behind the flesh. The cogs of steel ever-turning. His power was faint, even fainter than on their last encounter, but the taste of it had not changed. The presence of two aspects wreathed the man like two ravens on his shoulders, urging the villain to Lead and to Conquer. An old monster drenched in blood, come at his summons.
- “It ends today,” the White Knight said.
- The monster cocked his head to the side.
- “Uninspired,” he replied, and the lance descended.
- Lives flooded through Hanno’s mind and he chose the first he had prepared: the Lance of Light. His Name took his reflexes, his training, and replaced them with another man’s. The Knight went deeper still, until his eyes no longer felt as his own, and only then did the Light boil out of him. The radiant mount pawed at the grounds, scorching them, and his lance rose to match the abominations. Hanno was no jouster but Felix Caen, Duke of Liesse, had been the glory of Callow’s knighthood long before he led the doomed charge in the East that earned him his Name. The stance came easy to him as breathing and he watched the Black Knight lead his mount to face him. There should have been a hush over the battlefield, but no quarter was offered or given. The Legions still spewed death from the tower, though their crossbows and engines were alien to him. No less, he thought, should be expected from Praesi. There was no honour to the Wasteland, nothing but barren hatred to be found past the Blessed Isle.
- “Come, slave of the Tower,” the Lance of Light laughed. “Breaker of heroes. Come and die.”
- The mounts charged, death flying around them, and it was all wrong. It should have been an olive-skinned southerner, a vicious lady of the Hungering Sands with lips like fresh blood, not this pale leech before him. He would crush the thing anyway. Already the Lance could see the sequence, the alignment of men and horse, the way the tip of his lance would go through the throat. Then the man’s shield went down, hand hidden, and the Lance of Light spurred his horse. Death, death was offered to him and he would deliver it in the name of House Alban. Then the Praesi threw himself off his horse at the last moment.
- A heartbeat later, as the Lance passed by it, it exploded.
- Hanno landed on his back, breath stolen from him and smouldering. He hastily rose to his feet and found the Black Knight awaiting him with the flat his sword resting on his shoulder.
- “That remains a surprisingly effective trick,” the monster mused. “I really should send her a thank you note.”
- The White Knight frowned. He was talking. Bantering, instead of pressing advantage. Pale green eyes flicked to him.
- “Shall we get on with it?” the Carrion Lord drawled. “There is a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
- “You,” Hanno said. “What have you done?”
- “Blown up a rather expensive horse,” the Black Knight said. “With the dark and wicked spell of wick and cheap matches. My coffers aren’t what they used to be. Tremble, White Knight, for my power is truly boundless within reasonable limits.”
- The White Knight bared his sword, and let the Flawless Fencer flow into him. His stance changed. Sofia of Nicae had always been heavyset, nothing like the slender girls whose beauty was praised by the men, but she did not mind. Her only true love was the blade. This one was well-fitter to her hand, the weight of it perfect for her craft, and she closed the distance with anticipation thrumming in her veins. Praesi, this man, but she’d killed that ilk before. Bands of them had kept roving the Free Cities for years after the Dread Empress was unceremoniously thrown back into the sea by the coalition. It was not as satisfying to slay those as Ashurans, but it would keep her sated until supper. The foe was a sword-and-board man, and not half-bad. He danced properly when she struck, his parry technically perfect and riposte appropriately vicious. She elegantly turned it downwards, then struck across the throat. Ah, just a little too slow. She was off her form today. She circled around him, letting the slope weaken his stance, and offered a feint towards the eye. The shield went up, she closed the distance even as he struck and spun with him as he adjusted. Elbow to the back of the head, then she dropped under his answering swing and hit his helm with the pommel of her blade.
- The man worked through the pain, but his stance was broken. She drew blood at the juncture of his elbow, slid around the shield bash and hacked down on the extended fingers of his blade hand. She hummed approvingly when he decided he’d rather lose two fingers than the grip on his sword, then rewarded his courage by kicking his knee and forcing him down. He swung where she would have been, were she an idiot, but instead she kicked dirt into his face. Then, as he struggled with that, she kicked his chin and laid him down hard. Time to end this, then. The Flawless Fencer vanished back into the flood and the White Knight clasped his sword.
- “You are not him,” Hanno said.
- “A question almost theological in nature,” the thing noted. “Nefarious did have a certain knack for blasphemy.”
- “This is a trick,” the White Knight hissed. “You shy from judgement.”
- “Shall I give you a lesson, child?” the abomination said. “I so rarely get to monologue, but this is fortunate happenstance. You see, whatever I tell you will not matter. Not in the slightest. You are, by your nature, incapable of learning what I would teach. If you did it would destroy what a more poetic man might call your soul.”
- Hanno grabbed him by the throat, raised him up. The thing laughed.
- “What have you done?”
- “Agency, boy,” the abomination said, sounding amused. “You have discarded yours like a petty bauble and never once considered the cost. Blind faith is such tempting notion, isn’t it? Being able to believe in an answer, in a force, without ever questioning it. Certainty and blindness. I have always wondered at the difference.”
- “Where are you?”
- “Ah, already better,” the thing said approvingly. “But your true question is – why did you ever think I was here? And so the circle closes, and we return to the matter of faith.”
- He could have squeezed, snapped the neck, but he needed to know. To understand the trap so he could break it.
- “The answer, of course, is providence,” the abomination said. “You are here because that elusive golden luck of heroes told you I would be here to face you. And I am, in a sense. That is the rub, you see, when one relies on something one does not fully understand. If you do not know the rules, you do not know how they can be cheated.”
- “You cannot cheat the Heavens,” Hanno snarled.
- “Ah, but providence is a different matter,” the villain said. “It is a force, you see, not an intelligence. It cannot reason. If the greater part of what is me is here before you, well, that is the guidance it will provide. Never warning you that a mind and a body are very different things until it is much, much too late.”
- And just like that it fell into place.
- “You are in the other valley,” the White Knight said.
- “Praesi, Hanno, have so many flaws,” the abomination mused. “Sometimes it seems as if it is all we have. Yet there is one among them that I always believed to be a virtue, in its own way. All it takes is the faintest hope we will get away with it, and we will sit across even the Gods, smile and lie.”
- “There is nowhere I will not reach you,” Hanno replied quietly.
- He dropped the abomination, and it did not even attempt to rise. Its lips quirked into a smile, thin and narrow and vicious. A blade-smile.
- “Do enjoy your victory, White Knight,” he said.
- When Hanno’s blade cut through his neck, the body already had empty eyes.
- - Book 4, Interlude: Sing We Of Rage
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement