Wicked Throne, page 29
The sectumanimus glanced behind Ivar and nodded.
Two fingers poked Ivar’s back. The Shade muttered, “Sever.”
Fiery pain erupted under the bite, slugged deep, tearing a razor line into Ivar’s abdomen. The spell’s force pushed him off his feet. He caught himself on one knee. Coppery warmth surged up his throat and he coughed out fluid.
The Shade picked up the Ash Womb and dropped what Ivar had tried to give them on the floor beside him. It clanked and turned over.
“Sorry,” said the Shade. Ivar thought he meant it. But the Shade still carried the Ash Womb to his master. Ivar spat to clear his mouth. He edged away from the desk toward the door. Blood trailed down his front, down his bent leg, between his slippery hands.
“It’s about love and hate,” said the sectumanimus, watching him. “You think I can’t spot that trick? Dangle love or hate in front of someone and they lose all sense of perspective. You show up here offering me love— well, false love—you’ll offer what I want, and I’ll take it. Right?” He cradled the Ash Womb in both hands. “Well, I took it. So, in a sense, you get to die honorably, at last.”
The Shade looked at his feet.
A nasty smile twisted the sectumanimus’s face.
Wetness filled Ivar’s lungs. He coughed and the pain almost tore him senseless. He gurgled, “I offered you hate.” Ivar banished the glamour. The chalice in the sectumanimus’s hands blurred into a rough, blocky Terran cup —and Uthgarab, Eternally Stuck to the stem.
The sectumanimus’s face went green.
Ivar spoke the command to wake. And because the same magician who spoke the spell touched the oak pendant, Uthgarab exploded. The sectumanimus burst into thick black smoke. The velvet-backed chair burst. The desk burst. Sword-size wooden shrapnel flung across the room, burying itself in the dark wood walls. The windows exploded outward. The cherry carpet erupted in an expanding circle, incinerating the walls and black chandelier. The Shade screamed and vanished in the growing maelstrom. Raw Chaos magic launched in a cataclysmic wave, detonating matter in a chain reaction.
Somewhere deep down in Ivar’s hindbrain, a frightened mouse whispered, You have half a second if you want to try running.
He snatched the real Ash Womb from the carpet and swam to his feet. Ivar bolted for the door on legs he couldn’t feel. Deafening explosions roared behind him. His feet snagged on the hall rug, but he kept going, gasping through the bubbling supernova in his chest. Ivar cast a barricade shield over his shoulder and ducked when the shield burst. Exploded magic shrapnel scissored the hall as the floor bucked and the wood and silver trim went off like firecrackers.
Sleepy darkness crowded his mind. Darkness and Silence. He fell through the front doors. The blue eye swiveled around to stare at him—and exploded. Ivar slammed into the dock, rebounded to his feet teetering blind with pain, unable to breathe—really unable, not scared unable. The world blurred and he threw up pink gold. Ivar dragged himself into the first sled he saw and jammed it from the magnetic clamps.
They plummeted.
Ferocious g-force knocked some life back into him. Ivar’s dangling toes found the rubber pads and he pushed. The fall flattened into a steep dive that yanked him into the seat. The castle exploded. The sky howled and debris spat, but the shock wave only grew stronger, eating up the shopping center, booming outward.
The sled screamed through the city past the wall into the desert. It drifted downward. Ivar wrenched the controls with leaden hands. The earth and sky warped into a tunnel, and black spots swarmed his vision. Everything seemed to be happening inside a dream. The sled sank again, hit the ground, and jolted into the air. It flipped sideways and smashed into a mudflat. Ivar smacked into hot earth and rolled.
On the horizon, Vorsmad’s skeletal buildings erupted and streets launched blackened stone a hundred feet into the air. The ground vibrated like a drum. He pushed an elbow into the mud to turn himself onto his front, but his muscles spasmed so hard he lay flat. It hurt. It hurt so much. The sled lay on its side less than fifteen feet away, but there was no way he could reach it.
The earth hummed. Not just from the explosions but with a rasping sound like many bodies shuffling from underground. Pale shapes climbed from Vorsmad’s hills, rising from the tunnels. The Hive. Stranded, Ivar fought to keep his eyes open. Behind the apocalyptic clouds and smog, he caught sight of the day sinking behind the pocket world’s ice ceiling.
Somewhere, life continued. Somewhere, the sun dipped big and fat and ripened above this world and all others. A million prison colors lit up the sky’s edge. Evening came again.
Somewhere there were boats, and flowers.
Ivar wanted it to continue for a long, long time and weave back into the pattern. He wanted to help Nyrene fight for her throne. He wanted her child to love her. And Deercat, who’d been his friend. Maybe—and the words seemed half familiar to him, like he’d thought them before during his fake funeral—when the time comes, you’ve got a choice. Do you cry with regret at the things you don’t have, or do you smile at all you’ve done?
He wasn’t sad.
The maelstrom ate through the ghasts, and in the dark, they and all their misery were little more than patches through the smoke and twilight’s immortal golden fire. In minutes, all of Vorsmad would go up. Ivar wouldn’t escape but neither would the sectumanimus. They’d go together.
What happened next? How would God, if one existed, sort them out?
A falling star arched overhead. Ivar watched it go and frowned when the streak landed in the desert just behind him. Dust spat into the air. Boots slammed into the mud near his head.
“What have you done?” Deercat said, improbably.
Ivar squinted. The apparition worked his arms under Ivar’s back and legs and hefted him into the air, grunting from strain. Deercat lay him down in the back of a single-man Imperial fighter. A moment later, the ship bucked into the air like a whip, and they were moving, the steel floor humming as the ship sped over the dry riverbed, its lights cutting brilliant shafts into the dark.
“You’re lucky we were keeping watch on Vorsmad’s gate,” Deercat says. “We saw you cross the wards. Could have done without the gesture, though.”
The outpost on the hill erupted. The explosions caught its remaining walls, and the grand Imperial fortifications burst one by one. Deercat’s ship ducked down the oily beach toward the churning seagate. Ivar strained to see someone waiting on the other side, hoping to recognize Nyrene, or even Grastes, but the far side was only a smear of light, and, in some sense, it didn’t matter.
The world behind them, of mud and wreckage, vanished.
28
SIX WEEKS RESHAPED TES Ap Hanhga’s countryside from spiny vegetation to an overabundance of red and yellow flowers. Summer passed Ivar by, but autumn seemed to be settling in nicely. Deercat visited him in the healing tower from time to time. He listened to Ivar’s tale and took his turn stacking the fruit-flavored ice packets the healers gave Ivar to eat into forts. Sometimes he stacked them higher, and sometimes Ivar did.
When Ivar could walk, two guards dragged him from the healing bed and marched him through the crowded palace into Razanhi’s throne room. Ivar stood in the middle of the floor gazing up at the throne, wondering what was to become of him and why they’d bothered patching him up if they meant to execute him. The emperor, at least, looked alive this time. Razanhi sat heavily on the imitation throne, eyes dark where his father’s had been lively, feet on the floor.
The two guards stayed by Ivar’s side but didn’t shove him down. He supposed now that Razanhi knew he wasn’t a spirit, the emperor felt less precaution was due. At least they hadn’t put him in a handlock. Or a cage.
“So,” Razanhi said. His voice echoed, tired and dull, in the empty hall. “I owe you an apology.”
A musky breeze stirred the indigo-and-green hangings in the great glass throne room. Ivar cocked his head. “Beg pardon?”
“Lord Deercat told me something of the story you shared with him. I apologize. I was wrong. You weren’t the individual who abducted His Majesty or murdered our father. Your clone was responsible. You killed him. You avenged me and saved Sangearth.” The emperor’s sallow face pinched as though the words caused him physical pain. “You broke exile, risking death, to warn me about him in the first place.”
Razanhi’s speech sounded rehearsed. Ivar’s mind raced. He tried to catch up, but the emperor continued, “By the power of my throne and the light vested in me by Nab bel Rhys, first emperor of Almathea, I, Razanhi the First, do hereby pardon you.”
Ivar exhaled half his soul. He gaped at the man on the throne.
Razanhi glared at him. “I assume you accept.”
“I. . . .” Ivar shook his head. “Yes?”
“Good. Kneel.” Razanhi outstretched his bony hand half an inch from his armrest. Ivar glanced at the guards, then made his way down the long black carpet. He dropped to one knee and took Razanhi’s palm. Swallowing a residual pang, Ivar brushed his lips to the dry knuckles with the barest touch. Was this real? Had he died somewhere along the way and wound up in hell—or heaven? That he couldn’t tell the difference worried him.
“I swear fealty to the throne,” Ivar said. It wasn’t rehearsed, but even to his ears, it sounded no different from Razanhi’s dry voice. “And to its son and emperor, Razanhi bel Magg.”
Razanhi jerked his hand free like a man recoiling from a poisonous snake. “I accept your fealty, Ivar de Ryeleth. I have a mission for you. Stand up.”
A catch? Of course, there was a catch. “What mission?”
Razanhi’s face softened a little, passing from hateful into unpleasant. “My wife has fled to the ice tunnels outside Tes Ap Hanhga. Since you are the reason for our current—ah, disagreement—you will leave here and return only under close escort. You will never see her again.”
Black tar bubbled deep in Ivar’s guts. This was hell, all right. He kept his face a mask of disgruntled boredom.
Razanhi said, “Is that understood?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Razanhi’s shoulders sagged. “In addition, the throne recognizes the extraordinary feat you’ve performed in uncovering a conspiracy. I will not reinstate you in the Black Tower Guard, but I am making you a royal detective.”
His disgusted expression probably matched the one on Ivar’s face. “A what?”
“You will go out and look for other magic crimes to solve in my name. You will report to me. Personally.”
The tar squished into an icy brick. Ivar wrinkled his nose. I don’t want to be a royal detective. He wasn’t allowed to say anything other than, “Yes, Your Majesty.” Nyrene, I’ll find you. He can’t do this.
Yes, he could. Razanhi could do whatever he pleased with Ivar’s life, including end it. Ivar swallowed the hate gathering between his teeth before it got him into more trouble. At least Razanhi seemed as pissed about their truce as he was, though that brought little comfort.
A befeathered aide strode from the glittering shadows behind the throne. She handed Ivar a small silver ring. He turned it over in his hands. “Is this a ‘congratulations, you’re pardoned’ ring?”
She said, “His Majesty designed this for you to wear on your travels.”
Great, another Razanhi invention.
“You’ll issue reports into the onyx setting so he can hear you. It will monitor your journeys, as well, in case you require assistance.”
So it would spy on him, in essence. “Thank you, Your Majesty,” Ivar deadpanned.
“Good.” Razanhi growled, “Get out of my sight.”
Ivar flourished a bow and backed away, turning only when he’d reached the double doors that led to the hall. His heart squirmed, and he paused to catch his breath but the guards grabbed him under the arms and dragged him toward the central courtyard. Forced into servitude. He’d been pardoned, but he’d lost Nyrene again. Better or worse? Pardoned, and conscripted into his worst enemy’s service. Did that make him an exile, a hero, or something else? He didn’t know. Perhaps all three. Or perhaps there wasn’t an answer, and perhaps that was all anyone got from life. You didn’t get to be one thing.
Razanhi’s guards pushed him from the palace into sharp daylight where a boat waited to take him elsewhere. Ivar looked back, heartsick and annoyed but, strangely, at peace. Staring into his own death in Vorsmad had pushed him outside himself, made him look around at the world with fresh eyes. The broken edges inside him no longer cut so much, like a shattered bottle hurtled from a cliff but rolled into smooth gems by a relentless tide. Yes, he’d see the palace again. No, he didn’t like Razanhi holding him on a leash. But he’d bet his life he’d see Nyrene again.
Today, that was enough. He wasn’t the same person he’d been yesterday, or two months ago, and that was all right. Ivar pushed his old life away, dropped his head, and climbed aboard.
Well, he told himself. You know what? Whatever comes next, it’ll be one hell of a ride.
About The Author
Alex Hill
Surprising nobody, Alex Hill worked as a professional concept artist and still enjoys designing characters and equipment. Apart from writing, Alex can be found making a mess on both sides of the D&D table, exploring the world, and gaming.
Alex Hill, Wicked Throne
