Dark Heir, page 39
But the face was so identically hers, standing there as she had stood on the Dark Peak, like a ghost from a past he couldn’t escape.
Here to stop him; here to stop Sarcean.
‘Katherine?’ said Violet.
‘That’s not Katherine,’ said Will.
He took a step towards the pit. The others reacted with the same shock as Violet. But understanding slowly began to dawn on each of their faces.
‘It’s one of them,’ said Cyprian shakily. He drew his sword. ‘A Returner.’
‘I am Visander, the Queen’s Champion,’ said the soldier in Katherine’s body. ‘And I am here to kill the Dark King.’
Will took another step towards the pit. He had to stop the army. He had to reach the staff. Yet he wasn’t here. He was back in Bowhill: with Katherine drawing a sword; with his mother’s hands around his neck.
Violet was frowning. ‘The Dark King – what are you talking about?’
‘Has he lied? That’s what he does.’ Visander drew a sword, just as Katherine had done. ‘He’s here to take command of his army.’ Visander’s eyes were cold, determined, an expression he had never seen on Katherine’s face. ‘And I am here to kill him.’
‘Violet, take care of it,’ Will heard himself say as his hand opened, releasing Kettering from his grip.
‘I don’t know who you are, but if you’re here to stop the Dark King, we’re on the same side.’ Violet stepped forward, bracing her shield on her right arm.
‘Lion!’ Visander reacted to the Shield of Rassalon with fury. ‘I kill your kind where I find them.’
Violet drew her sword.
If seeing the shield had made Visander furious, the sight of her sword seemed to hit him like a blow, staggering him before he focused on her with complete attention. ‘You – dare – to wield Ekthalion? You foul creature of the Dark, I will strike it from your hands and run it through your heart!’
They clashed, as Kettering dashed for the pit.
Violet was Lion-strong, and she had been trained by Justice. She had skill born of hard work and dedication alongside the kind of dominating strength that had held back wave after wave of Sinclair’s men. It was an impossible combination of gifts that had allowed her to kill a Shadow King.
Visander inhabited a body that was not his own, that was untrained and weak, and that before Bowhill had never even held a sword. He looked like he ought to be dancing a quadrille with a dainty hand atop that of his dance partner. Not fighting to the death with a two-handed sword.
It didn’t matter. Within a handful of seconds, Violet was bleeding from the arm, where he’d flicked a knife at her, and then from the leg, looking shocked that any blow had landed on her at all. Cyprian leaped towards him with a cry, only to be disarmed and sent sprawling. Visander kept his attention on Violet.
‘Did you think I hadn’t fought Lions before?’ Visander said, with a strike so hard it knocked Violet on her back and sent the Shield of Rassalon clanging from her hand to the ground. ‘You’re not even a true Lion.’ He lifted his sword.
It was too fast for Violet to dodge Visander’s sword swinging towards Violet’s unprotected neck—
A small whirlwind flew out of the shadows and threw itself in front of the sword.
‘Stop it! Don’t hurt her, don’t hurt Violet! Stop!’
Elizabeth stood right in Visander’s way, her hair mussed and her dress dirty and torn, panting with effort and urgency.
His blade had stopped. He was staring at the young girl in front of him. Elizabeth stood with both feet planted wide, staring back at him.
But it was Will who stood rooted in shock. Of course she was here. Of course Visander had told her not to come, and she had ignored him, and followed him doggedly over the mountain on her pony.
There was a rumbling from the direction of the pit.
‘Elizabeth!’ said Violet. She closed her hand on her shield and pushed herself back up onto her feet as Visander said, ‘My Queen. Get out of my way.’
‘No. Violet’s my friend!’
‘Your friend is a Lion. She serves the Dark.’
‘If I’m your queen, you have to do as I say,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and I say leave her alone!’
With a brief, bitten-off snarl, Visander lowered his blade, the ten-year-old prevailing over the Champion.
Violet, quick to use any advantage, no matter how strangely it was created, was instantly holding the sharp edge of Ekthalion to Visander’s throat.
‘It’s over, Returner,’ said Violet.
Only to find Elizabeth dragging at her arm with her full weight. ‘No, let him go!’
‘He tried to kill Will!’ said Violet.
Elizabeth said, ‘Will is the Dark King.’
Everything stopped; a twisting, terrible sensation as his friends turned to look at him, to look at him and see him. He needed to speak, to open his mouth and deny it, and he couldn’t. It was like sensation of falling. Or maybe he’d been falling since Bowhill and it was the moment when everything hit.
‘Will?’ said Violet.
The pit exploded as a violent pressure from the depths was released, sending them all flying. Huge chunks of marble plunged like meteors, slamming down around them as the ground itself split. Half crack, half eruption, it collapsed the chamber in a burst of dust and rubble.
Will couldn’t see anything at first, coughing out the dust, his arm over his mouth. Wide-eyed, he looked around in the haze, needing to see from which direction the attack would come. From Visander. From Elizabeth. From Cyprian. From Violet … please not from Violet.
As the brutal shaking of the earthquake stopped, the dust began to clear.
The throne room was in ruins, chunks of ceiling collapsed between shattered columns. The pit had widened, part of a new crack that ran all the way through the floor. Slices of the ground had reared and tilted. Like icebergs grinding against one another, the sound of their occasional movement was an ominous groan.
He saw the others. Visander had thrown himself over Elizabeth, protecting her. Violet was pushing a fallen stone column aside with strength that didn’t seem real. Behind it, Cyprian and Grace were emerging from where they’d been trapped.
Grace said, ‘Where’s Kettering?’
‘The pit,’ said Cyprian, staring past Will, who turned to face the oubliette.
Like a nightmare, the first Returner came rising from the crack. It didn’t have a stable form, but seemed to flicker, a face appearing and disappearing in its amorphous darkness.
The army that had seemed like an endless chamber of horrifying statues was rising, not as figures but as spirits – no, as shadows – ready to possess the first body they touched.
Violet immediately thrust herself in front of the others, swinging her shield.
‘Get behind me!’ cried Violet. A second Returner was rising from the crack. This one turned its sightless eyes on the others and shrieked, a sound that turned the blood cold.
Shadows, thought Will, that could possess people. No one alive could fight them. Except Violet. She had killed shadows before. She killed this one, decapitating it with her shield, then swung at the second, pushing it back.
Will didn’t get behind her.
‘Will,’ she said urgently.
He walked forward towards the pit, where another Returner was rising, a monstrous shadow. He saw the fear in Violet’s eyes at where he was going, now that there was no choice left at all.
Will said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s the only way to stop this.’ He took the rope.
And dropped down into the pit, where the shadows whirled. ‘Will!’ he heard her scream behind him, and then he was too deep inside to hear anything.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
IT WAS HER worst nightmare come to life. Not just one shadow but hundreds, a spewing mass of writhing shapes, rising up out of the pit in the floor.
Violet pushed in front of the others, and without thinking drew her shield.
‘Get behind me!’ she shouted to Cyprian and Grace, knowing that if a shadow so much as touched them—
If a shadow so much as touched any of them—
Will. Her mind was whirling. Will, Will, Will. He had jumped into the pit, running towards the danger as he always did, to save people. Will was a hero. He was Blood of the Lady. He wasn’t—
She swung the shield and hit the first shadow, which exploded, shrieking. The next had a clear shape, torso and long arms, and the flickering impression of a head that she decapitated with a hard swing. Behind it, a knot of shadows screamed and rushed at her. She killed one. Two. Three.
‘Fall back!’ said Cyprian.
‘Will’s in there,’ she said. ‘We have to get to him!’
Cyprian said, ‘You can’t fight a whole army!’
Violet said, ‘I will if I have to!’
The shield was heavy on her arm. She swung it over and over, her body aching. She fought as they backed out of the throne room, into a corridor: a bottleneck where the shadows couldn’t swirl around her and take her friends. If even a single one got past her, it would take Grace or Cyprian or Elizabeth. Her friends would fall to the white death, and rise with someone else in their body.
She kept killing. Could you kill the dead? How many swings did she have left before she could no longer lift the shield? She remembered her lessons with Justice. He had forced her into utter exhaustion, and then said, ‘Again,’ as if he had known that she would have to fight like this, kill like this, again, and again, and again.
We train for the opponent that we will face, Justice had said, when the day comes that we are called on to fight.
It was how Justice had fought at the end, holding off the shadow as long as he could, fighting to buy the Elder Steward time. That was what she must do. Hold them off until … hold them off until … what?
Until Will stopped them? Until a hundred thousand shadows had swarmed out of the pit, infecting everyone on the mountain? She fought harder, panting, and when she thought she could fight no more, she drew on some last reserve and clanged Ekthalion and her shield together as she let out a roar, challenging the shadows like a defiant gladiator in the arena. For a moment, the swirling shadows hesitated, as if no single shadow wished to challenge her.
In that pause, she was panting, sweat dripping from her, and she’d told Will she could do it, that she could hold back the horde, but as she looked at the torrent of darkness that faced her, she realised that it was impossible.
There were too many shadows, and she could not fight forever; they were going to overwhelm her.
She felt a presence beside her and expected it to be Cyprian, come to stand with her at the end. But it wasn’t.
It was a girl with golden curls and the face of a porcelain doll.
‘Lion,’ Visander said. ‘Give me Ekthalion.’
She looked over at Katherine, changed and strange. There was a fierceness in her expression that Violet had never seen before. And a soldier’s assessing of the odds that she remembered from Justice’s face. Not Katherine, she reminded herself. Visander. The Queen’s Champion.
He said, ‘I know we are on opposite sides, but I will protect the girl.’ He looked at Elizabeth, whose face looked pale but stubborn in the flickering torchlight.
‘You can’t fight a shadow. No one can.’ Violet shook her head. It wasn’t a matter of skill. You couldn’t fight what you couldn’t touch. She remembered how it had felt to face the Shadow King: her sword had passed through his shadowy form as though it were made of air. Nothing but the Shield of Rassalon could stop a shadow.
Visander only looked more determined, unafraid of the shadows before them, even defiant as he faced them.
‘That sword was forged by Than Rema to cut down the dark. Put Ekthalion into my hands, and I will show you the power of the champion.’
A moment of hesitation; fate turning. She tightened her grip on the sword, then tossed it to Visander.
He caught it, sweeping Ekthalion around in an arc as the dark whirl of shadow forms screamed and seethed, almost boiling at that blade of shining silver that seemed to be made of light. In the next moment, the shadows burst forward towards them.
Visander was, she realised, the best fighter she had ever seen. Better than Cyprian. Better than Justice. Better than any Steward. He was hampered by a body weaker than his own, but his knowledge and skill were such that it overrode this limitation. Marcus’s words came back to her. We cannot do this alone. We must gather the old allies.
We must find the Champion who can wield Ekthalion
And reforge the Shield of Rassalon
Ekthalion sliced the first shadow in half, and as Violet swung her shield, Visander was already moving to kill the second, showing none of the fear or hesitation that she might have expected.
This was the power of the champion. Visander had fought shadows before. Perhaps he had even fought hundreds of shadows, his sword cutting through the dark in the same way as her shield.
A Lion and a Champion fighting side by side.
She felt the significance of it, creating a wall of strength, even as she knew that she was not a true Lion, and could not hold out forever.
She buckled first, for she had been fighting longer. Visander was not fast enough to fill the gap. A shadow was through; she whipped her head, frantic to stop it reaching Cyprian or Grace. Shouting to warn them, for a single moment she broke her concentration.
Rushing black filled her vision; there was a Returner forcing its cold, horrifying way into her mouth, into her nose, another trying to get into her eyes, darkness filling her. She thrashed and tried to hit out at what was already inside, feeling shadows stream over her, like the breaking of a dam, to burst over the others.
A small girl’s body threw itself over hers, and the last words that Violet might ever hear were Elizabeth, screaming desperately—
‘Phillip’s jacket!’
Light exploded outward; a shattering ball of a thousand suns.
The shadow was blasted away from Violet’s eyes, the sudden light so bright that she couldn’t see. Blinded, she threw her shield up in front of her eyes to cover them, but the retina-searing light burned even through her hot, aching eyelids. Her single glimpse of the others – crying out and covering their own eyes – was etched into her mind before everything went white.
She could feel Elizabeth, still curled to cover her, breathing shallowly.
Brightness faded, and after long minutes of silence, she dared to lower her shield.
Slowly, she opened her eyes.
She expected – she wasn’t sure what she expected. To be dead. To be blind. Through burning, tear-filled eyes, she saw a swimming vision of the others sprawled on the ground around her, as though a blast had thrown them there. And around them all was a gentle, cocooning light.
Violet began levering herself up, blinking sore eyes and looking around in shaky wonder.
A bubble of light enclosed them. It was keeping the shadows back, though they swooped and screamed impotently at its boundary, shrieking in frustration when they couldn’t reach them, powerless.
For darkness cannot bear the light.
At the centre of the glowing sphere was Elizabeth, who stood with her short legs planted, her eyebrows drawn down fiercely.
We must gather the old allies. Marcus’s words rang in her mind.
We must Call for the King
We must find the Lady of Light
We must find the Champion who can wield Ekthalion
And reforge the Shield of Rassalon
Her eyes were still streaming, Violet realised as she raised the back of her hand to wipe them.
‘Will this hold?’ said Violet.
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, but the word seemed born of stubbornness rather than knowledge.
Violet recalled just how quickly holding open the gate had drained James of his power. If Elizabeth was creating the light, it would not last long.
Violet looked back towards the pit, still shrouded in darkness. Will was down there. Will had walked into those shadows as though they were nothing.
He just left us here. He just left us.
Doubt put its cold fingers on her, a chilling touch. The light protecting them had been conjured by the Blood of the Lady – by Elizabeth. They stood together, allies in the light. Will had walked alone into the dark.
‘The Dark King seeks to take control of his army,’ said Visander, hefting Ekthalion onto his shoulder. ‘We must stop him.’
‘Will is not the Dark King,’ said Violet.
The others were staring at her. They stood together, Cyprian and Grace alongside Visander and Elizabeth, the silence thick.
‘He couldn’t light the Tree,’ said Cyprian slowly, as though he didn’t want to believe it.
Even slower: ‘But he could touch the Corrupted Blade,’ said Grace. ‘He was immune to its corruption. He was immune to the white death.’
The light around them was as warm and beautiful as the Tree of Light. Will hadn’t conjured it, she thought. Will had never been able to conjure light. But she had seen him walk into shadows. In the Hall, she had seen him touch the Shadow Stone.
‘He’s my friend,’ said Violet.
‘He lies. He is the King of Lies,’ said Visander. ‘He will say and do anything to achieve his ends.’
‘You don’t know him,’ said Violet. ‘You don’t know him like I do.’
‘Don’t know him!’ Visander’s eyes blazed. ‘I know him far better than any of you. I have seen the dawn bring no day, I have ridden a valley of death, sailed a black ocean where nothing stirs, fallen back to a once-great outpost where the last flickering light illuminated only despair. It is you who knows nothing. Nothing but his lies. You have no idea what he can do.’
‘Are you certain?’ said Cyprian.
‘Look around you. He has returned to his palace,’ said Visander. ‘He has unleashed his armies. And he is about to take up his throne.’
Violet looked towards the pit, streaming with darkness, an endless vomiting belch like black smoke pouring from a chimney column.
‘We can’t get inside,’ she said. ‘Only a creature of the Dark can get close to the Dark King’s staff. There’s no way to follow him.’
