Pillar of Ash, page 31
“They’re already dead,” he replied, stepping back and drawing his short sword. He glanced up at a swirl of silver as Windwalkers streaked overhead. “I must help. I’ll keep watch over you, and if I see Berin, I’ll bring him to you.”
I swallowed the selfish urge to stop him and nodded instead.
A dull determination overtook me as Isik disappeared into the wind and I joined the flow of warriors and legionaries to the shield circle. I grabbed the arm of a man I thought was Berin, and was rewarded by a blank stare from a stranger. I didn’t dare call for my brother, or raise the horn at my belt—not when the gods still spoke, their voices filling the entire island. But I wove my way to the spot where I’d last glimpsed Seera and Esan, and prayed he would be there.
I came face to face with my mother instead. One eye still on the gods in their human hosts, she took my arm.
“Where is your brother?” she asked, her shield and one of her axes clenched in her other hand.
“I’m looking for him.”
That wasn’t the answer she wanted. After a momentary pause she released me, pulled her second axe from her back with a swift tug, and offered the weighty weapon to me.
I stared at the axe, from its hooded head to its iron-wrapped haft replete with runes. Its name glistened there—Galger, the weapon of Eang’s right hand. The weapon my mother had slain her false goddess with, when she was barely more than a girl.
Beyond the lines, the Revenants and Fith continued their approach.
“I know you don’t want this,” Hessa said, her voice low, gentle without being soft. “None of us do. But our world is broken—that is the simple, unavoidable truth. And if we do not act, if we do not use every tool available to us and sacrifice our own desires, there will be no one left to heal.”
Slowly, I laid my staff down and took the axe instead. I untied the hood and clipped it to my belt, leaving the long, bearded blade exposed to the muted light.
There was power in peace and a gentle hand. I knew that with the same surety that I knew my mother loved me, that Berin was alive and that, today, the price of peace would be blood.
My mother passed me her shield, painted with a leaping lynx, and I took it without question. Then she reached out, cupped the back of my head, and kissed my forehead.
I closed my eyes, bowed to her touch, and grasped my weapons with hands that did not shake.
Thirty-Nine
I left my mother as a Fith horn blared and Revenants charged the circle of shields. The ever-advancing wall of the Unmade was just outside of bowshot now—the Unmade was closing in, driving the Revenants toward us, and the gods had fallen silent. The crash of wood and flesh and steel and bone filled the gap, along with battle cries and screams.
I lifted my horn to my lips and blew. My call was weak, shuddering with each fall of my feet, but it drifted over the shrinking island.
An answering bay sounded from across the battlefield, to the north. I diverted, streaking across the lines of retreating Arpa, Duamel, Eangen, Algatt, and Soulderni.
Seera materialized, then Esan and Ittrid. We didn’t have the breath to greet one another, but fell in together as we topped a rise of roots and looked down into a hollow.
There, Berin struggled to one knee, braced on his wavering shield. Nui crouched before him, facing down Logur. Behind him, Bara lay limp in Sedi’s arms. Sedi herself slumped over her husband, her face so sheeted with blood I couldn’t see if her eyes were open.
Logur looked up as we crested the lip of the hollow. He sneered. It was a sneer of victory and malice, utterly unconcerned by the warriors at my side or the axe in my hand, or even the relentless approach of the Unmade. Twenty Revenants and Fith surrounded him, gore-caked and wild-eyed.
Berin caught sight of us and found new strength, staggering to his feet and hefting his shield. Neither Sedi nor Bara stirred.
Nui released a howling, snarling bark at the riverman. He flicked his hand toward her, and Revenants scattered—half toward the hound, Berin, Sedi, and Bara, and half toward us.
I started down the slope, leaping and scrambling with the others on my heels. We met the enemy with an eerie silence—no shouts or war-cries, just grim, jaded intent.
When a Fith charged, I hacked. When my companions stumbled, I healed them. When a clawed hand nearly tore my stomach open, Seera cut the creature down. When a Revenant pinned Nui to the ground, I took off its limbs with brutal, efficient cuts, and greeted the hound with a bloody, ruffling hand.
There was no fury in my actions, no hunger to give pain or drive for vengeance. Every movement I made was a sacrifice, an act of love and loyalty, grim and bloody though it was. And when I thought of my mother’s face as I’d left her, streaked with blood and speckled with ash, I thought that I perhaps understood her for the first time.
When I met Logur, I did not hesitate to swing. The riverman snarled. He dodged my axe and twisted lithely, slipping through my guard, but my shield was there. I threw my weight forward and barreled into the riverman, knocking him backward. Esan and Ittrid surged into the opening, slashing.
Logur fled behind a cluster of Fith—more easterners appeared from over the ridge, answering some unspoken call. They surged to protect him with their fragile bodies and war-cries of determination and dread.
I hesitated, then, as I met the eyes of the young woman throwing herself toward me, spear angled for a gutting stab.
Then Askir was there, thrusting into the gap between me and my assailant. He knocked the spear aside and brought a hatchet down on the woman’s shoulder, the movements so fast I could barely follow.
Another Fith tackled him. My axe stuck in their back. I wrenched and twisted the blade, dragging the man off Askir as I did. Distantly, I was aware of the horror of that action—cracking bone, raw lips of flesh and the convulsing of my enemy.
Before I could free my axe, Askir stumbled into me. His hand grasped my arm, fingers digging painfully into my skin. His face was too close, his blue eyes stark and clean amid a face streaked with ash and blood. The Algatt paints in his hairline were nearly wiped away, yellows and blues faded. He’d dropped his weapon, and he pawed at an arrow embedded in his ribs—pawed with the stump where his right hand had been.
He began to collapse. I fumbled to catch him, already trying to pour healing power into his broken body, but he was too heavy and the chaos too thick. My knees threatened to buckle. Another Fith stabbed at me with a commandeered Arpa sword, and I barely raised my shield in time.
The sword slammed into the other side, tactless and untrained. Desperate. I dropped Askir and braced, standing over the prone priest. I caught the Fith’s next thrust with my shield and slammed the weapon forward, smashing the rim into his jaw.
The Fith’s head snapped back and he dropped like a stone. I dropped my shield too, arm aching, knuckles raw from impacting the inside of the boss. I shook out my hand and reclaimed my axe, then grabbed Askir’s tunic to pull him—where? There were enemies on every side. Except for where Berin now knelt, Ittrid and Seera holding back the tide of attackers.
Hands joined mine and Esan heaved Askir toward our friends. “Here! I have him. Go to Berin!”
I left them with one more push of healing power, grabbed my shield again, and bolted for Berin. Ittrid wove past me going the other way, Berin’s sword in her hand, and a flood of new warriors joined the melee—a mixture of legionaries, Algatt and Soulderni and Eangen, and the white-haired maelstrom that was Kygga.
The remaining Revenants fled the hollow. If Logur went with them, I did not see. All I saw was Berin. He held his Arpa shield at chest height, but as I approached, he let it drop and sagged back into a wall of the hollow.
I saw the gashes across his stomach before I registered the glassiness of his eyes, and the unhealthy paleness of his usually tawny cheeks. I dropped my shield and grabbed the blade of my axe, ignoring a flash of pain.
“Yske,” he said, the word greeting and thanks and love all at once.
“I’m here,” I reassured him, and pressed my palm into his chest.
Magic flared and flowed. Berin clasped his hand over mine and held my gaze as I worked, his dark eyes holding my green ones, the skin of his palm gritty with blood and dirt.
“We need to go,” Esan panted, rejoining us. His eyes lingered on the approaching Unmade, stretching far above us and too close for comfort. It was a stone’s throw away now, and I glimpsed westerners and legionaries chasing fleeing Revenants west around the lip of our hollow, followed by a thunder of Arpa cavalry. Horns sounded, calling a rally.
Esan said, “Seera, take Sedi.”
“She’s gone.”
My cousin’s voice tore my eyes from Berin. There she knelt beside Sedi and Bara, her face stricken and her hands clasping Sedi’s limp fingers. “Bara…”
She didn’t have to say. I could tell by looking at Bara now, this close, that his life had ended—half his face was buried in Sedi’s side, but I saw the distant emptiness of his eyes.
I felt the color drain from my face. Berin shuddered beneath my grip and the tears in his eyes had nothing to do with the dust. His one hand tightened on mine, on his chest, and he climbed slowly to his feet, taking me with him. Then he went to Seera, pulled her to her feet and into his embrace, wordless and watery-eyed.
“We have to go,” he rasped, his eyes sweeping us and fixing on Askir.
“I have him,” Esan said.
“Run!” Arune’s voice bellowed from the western edge of the hollow. He was already jogging out of sight, surrounded by a flood of obedient warriors. In moments, we would be alone—alone with the bodies of our friends, Revenants and Fith, and the wall of the oncoming void.
“Can we… Can we go through the rift? Is there any escaping this?” Ittrid’s voice was raw and her dark skin crusted with blood. She kept looking back at Bara and Sedi as we left the hollow, ignoring how the Unmade reared in tatters above our heads.
“It’s not over yet.” It was all I could do not to look back, too, but one last glimpse of our friends, crumpled forms again would help no one. I squeezed Berin’s hand one more time and nodded back toward the door to the High Halls. “Our god is here. Come.”
The fight to the rift was the bloodiest and closest yet. I moved by instinct alone, all immediate thought silenced, my head an echo of distant observations—a knot of Duamel, harrying and butchering a pack of Revenant wolves. Seera’s mother, Uspa, joining us with her running hounds, her hand gentle on her daughter’s back as she cried and ran. Nui, racing ahead over mounds of bodies.
In the midst of the destruction, Gadr, former god of the Algatt, lay dead upon one of the tree’s ruptured roots, his ribs torn open and his blood ceased in its flow. Esach stood over him against the carded sky, her eyes dull, her gray hair windblown about her head. Isik stood beside her, disheveled and unmoving, his shoulders hunched forward in cresting grief and anger. The Unmade inched closer to them, but the former Goddess of Storms and her son lingered.
I hesitated. My first thought was to run to Gadr, to try to save him, but I’d seen enough death to recognize there was nothing to be done.
Isik must have sensed my gaze. He looked up, reached to touch his mother’s arm, and whispered to her. The exchange took only a breath, then Isik descended toward me, taking each laborious step in anguished, human form.
I took him into my arms for one brief crush. I did not bother asking if he was all right; he did not bother placating me. We simply knit our hands together and rejoined the flow toward the rift.
There is a wonderment and terror, I learned that day, in being a human at the mercy of the gods—the created at the feet of one’s creator. I thought I knew that feeling already. I thought I had felt it a hundred times as I stood in temples and holy places, as I prayed and sacrificed and sang the songs of our history.
But as we rejoined the survivors at the golden rift, I realized I had never truly known what it meant to be a creation. The worship I’d experienced before was a shadow of this yawning, crippling, exhilarating knowledge.
The vessels of the Four Pillars still stood beside the doorway to the High Halls. They were silent now, their bodies still and their heads upturned, but I had a sense of conflict, of communication, and the ominous, pressing build of a gathering wave. Light radiated from each of them, and three pillars of light—golden, copper, and palest blue— began to emanate from their bodies. They stretched up into the sky to join Imilidese. The Four Pillars of Creation.
Berin, our companions and I fell in beside our parents, Hessa and Imnir, well but bloodied. My father kissed my forehead, and Nui laced between our legs. The Unmade loomed, its tendrils thick and spiraling, but no one ran. The survivors clustered instead, rank upon rank, a solid mass of flesh that even the last, most devoted Revenants and Fith could not break—no matter how viciously they tried.
In a breath of petrichor, Esach reformed beside us. She did not meet my eyes, her gaze fixed on the Pillars. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw the root where Gadr had lain had been swallowed by the Unmade. The former god of the Miri, enemy of Eang and child of the Gods of the Old World, was gone. Hundreds, thousands of bodies vanished with him, and the world shrank. I could only think in passing of their souls, of Bara’s and Sedi’s, and what would become of them.
All at once the void closed around us, swallowing everything and throwing us into unnatural night. Screams and shouts burst from the assembly, survivors crushing closer, holding one another and praying in half a dozen tongues.
But we did not fade. The ground beneath us did not disappear. The light of Thvynder, Eiohe, and Imilidese remained—blazing brighter and brighter, holding the darkness back until I could look at it no longer. I bowed my head into Isik’s chest.
The pressure broke. The gathering darkness shattered and rushed back into the east, back to where the border of the Unmade had stood since the beginning of time. But instead of reforming, it continued on and began to change. It knit into itself and laced with shadows, taking on light and depth and form.
Not unmaking, but making.
Imilidese yielded not with a scream, but a whisper. Feen crumpled to the earth, followed moments later by Ursk, Estavius, Omaskat, and Vistic. All four Pillars vanished from the sky, wrapping us in sudden gloom, and the eastern horizon rolled aside like storm clouds from the sea.
I stared at a new world, its far horizon crested with the light of a distant blooming sun. Light fell across us in bold golden streams and stars ignited in the sky, brighter and clearer and thicker than I’d ever seen before. Mountains rose in the distance, belching fire into a young sky, and the water of the lake began to spill over the boundary into new rivers, new creeks and tributaries between shoulders of barren rock. Steam hissed up through beams of light, and my heart thundered against my ribs.
“How? How are we still here?” Berin asked, hovering close to Isik and me with our mother’s shield at his feet. He stared at the newly forged east. “How is that… Where did that come from?”
“They turned her power to creation instead of destruction,” Esach explained softly, standing tall and pale-faced next to her son.
“A world beyond the Unmade,” I breathed. “A new creation.”
Forty
I watched the pyres cool as midnight drew close. Beyond their low, flickering glow, charred bones and drifts of smoke, the newly made eastern land roiled in restless sleep. Rivers of fire traced the horizon, carving and shaping the new land under a blanket of night.
“Where is Imilidese now?” I asked Aita. She’d drawn up to my side some time ago, her fur-tufted boots silent on a clean blanket of snow. The air was chilled, despite the fires, and I held the sides of my cloak closed—my father’s cloak, wrapped around my shoulders by his gentle hands as I watched Sedi’s and Bara’s pyres burn. My tears had long dried, and my companions had slipped away to nurse their grief together.
“In the land itself.” Aita nodded to the fiery horizon. She had spent the battle healing, keeping the vessels of Thvynder, Eiohe, and Eirine alive during the assault. “She poured herself into unmaking this world. Thvynder and the others pushed her power back into the Unmade, and she… went with it. Along with the souls of so many dead.” The Miri crossed her arms beneath the fall of her own lavender cloak.
I looked down at my feet. Sedi and Bara’s souls, Gadr’s soul—they could not be found. The soul of every person who had died on the island was gone, seemingly into the new creation. What that meant, no one could begin to guess.
“I could not save Feen,” Aita went on. “Even I could not repair the damage Imilidese’s possession did to her… The foxfire was… unstoppable. But Ursk, Estavius, Vistic and Thvynder live.”
I nodded slowly. The latter news was a balm to my aching heart, but I had more questions. “Logur?” I asked.
“Some of the Winterborn have gone after him, but it seems he headed further east.” Aita’s eyes narrowed at the new world. When I looked up at her, she shook her head, anticipating my question. “No, not Thray. She remained. They may not find Logur. That land is too young, too raw. It will settle someday, and will become a land like any other. But for now, it rages.”
I let my eyes fall to the pyres, most of which held no bones, bodies lost to the sweep of the Unmade. Beyond them, hulking in the night, Aegr wandered, the profile of his great ursine head silhouetted here and there against the fires. The arch of his powerful shoulders. The claws of his plodding feet.
“I wish I could have saved them all,” I said quietly. My grief was an understated thing, hard-edged and waiting for a lonely moment to crumble. “But without your gift… none of us would have survived.”
Aita looked at me, cool surprise in her features. “He hasn’t told you.”
I furrowed my brows. “What?”
“Isik stole the adris leaf from me,” she said. “Just as Liv did, long ago. I did not send it. And he did not realize what it would do to you. He thought only to ensure you came home alive. Instead, he bound you to magic I would never have burdened you with.”
