Hinterland

A NECESSARY MERCY

Weighted by despair,Tylar moved back toward the stern of the boat.

The daemon had settled to the island, vanishing among the flames and structures. Plainly Perryl had been ilked to protect the island, a ravening guard of Dark Grace.

How could he hope to defeat the daemon?

Tylar hobbled to the middle of the boat and sat down heavily, earning a complaint from his side, sharpening his breath. The others followed.

He motioned for the giant to pull the skiff farther back out of sight.

Dart settled to a bench opposite him. She was staring as he rubbed his knee. “You’ll be killed,” she whispered, voicing his own worry.

“The lass is right,” Rogger said. “You could barely drive the beastie off last time. Now that ghawl is wraithed and has the full might of the enslaved rogues feeding it.”

“But I have the sword,” Tylar said. “Forged anew.”

Dart met his eyes. “But a blade is only as strong as its wielder.”

Tylar recognized an old adage drilled into every page and squire. It was probably one of the first lessons Dart had been taught by Swordmaster Yuril. He reached out and patted her knee.

Leaning back, he faced the others. “It’s not like this is a battle we can walk away from.”

Brant’s voice was grim. “Maybe Tashijan has already fallen.”

Tylar shook his head. “Until I know otherwise, we must hold in our hearts that it stands.”

He read the defeat in all their eyes as he stared across the boat.

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer a stronger body, but here is the weapon I must wield. If I could pull the naethryn from my body and cure it of the poison, I would. Until then, the stone helps.”

Tylar remembered Perryl’s threat. You are riddled with the blood of Chrism. Nothing in Myrillia. Nothing in the naether can burn this poison away.

“But why?” Rogger asked, drawing back.

“Why what?”

“Why does the stone help?”

Tylar shook his head. “I don’t know…” He remembered how it felt when the stone ignited the sword, a sense of the world tightening and sharpening around him. “I think the stone rallies aethryn and naethryn together. Returning what was sundered. Meeryn’s aethryn must somehow support its naethryn.”

“But not completely,” Rogger said, scratching his beard.

“Not while it’s inside me. Like I said, if I could pull the naethryn out-”

Rogger lifted a hand. “What if instead of pulling it out of you, we went inside of you? Right through that black palm print of yours.”

Tylar frowned.

Rogger met his eye and said one word. “Balger.”

Tylar flashed back to being imprisoned in Foulsham Dell. The fire god of that realm, who had been curious about his mark, tested it with his hand. Instead of finding flesh, his fingers had fallen through the blackness. Balger had reached far enough in to get his hand bitten off by the naethryn inside him.

“A god could take that stone,” Rogger continued, “and hand it to your naethryn. Then perhaps aethryn and naethryn could join more fully and burn the poison away, breaking its hold, like the stone did to the seersong in Miyana.”

Tylar considered this possibility. Perryl’s words echoed. Nothing in Myrillia. Nothing in the naether. But what about something in the aether?

Finally he shook his head. “Unless I can get one of those rogues to cooperate, we have no god to attempt it.”

“No,” Rogger said, “but we do have a godling. And she is able to see farther into our mark than any of us.”

Dart sat straighter, eyes wide as moons. “But I’ve touched his mark before. Nothing happened.”

Rogger nodded. “But what about Pupp? He already walks between worlds. He delivered the stone to Tylar. Why not to his naethryn, too?”

Dart shifted in her seat, slowly nodding. She patted her thigh, plainly calling her companion. “I think I can get him to do it.”

Tylar held out little hope of success, but it would not cost much time to attempt it. For the plan he intended anyway, he wanted the flitterskiff pulled back a fair distance, back to the clear channel. So he had a few moments. He directed the giant to haul them back far enough until Rogger could ignite the mekanicals.

While the two men worked, Tylar stripped open his cloak and parted the shirt beneath to expose the mark on his chest.

“Let’s be quick about this,” he said.

Dart held out her hand. “I’ll need the stone.”

He nodded. He already had the sword pulled. Grabbing the hilt in one hand and the diamond in the other, he twisted them in opposite directions, popping the stone from the pommel. He felt the snap deep within him. Pain lanced out from his core and shocked through to the tips of his limbs. His sword hand spasmed, tightening again into a knobbed grip.

Dart looked on with concern.

Tylar passed her the stone, gone dull again. The sword’s blade had also blown itself out. She nicked a finger and daubed the stone. It flared again from rock to gem.

She motioned with her other hand. “Lie across the bottom of the skiff.”

Feeling slightly foolish, Tylar obeyed.

Off to the side, blocked by the solid bench, Dart leaned down, reached out, and whispered. Tylar saw a ruddy glow flare up beyond the bench, bright in the darkness.

Pupp.

Over the bench’s edge, the creature rose into view, all molten armor and fire. He clambered to the top and stared down, the gem brilliant in his jaws, lit by inner fire.

“Lie still,” Dart told him. “He’s not very comfortable about this.”

Tylar remembered the burned stump of the squire’s arm-Pupp needn’t be the one worried here.

Pupp lowered from the bench to Tylar’s shoulder. The nails of his paw sliced through cloak to skin, steaming hot. Tylar winced. Pupp crawled, belly low, toward the black handprint on his chest.

Beyond Pupp, the others all gathered around.

“You all might want to step back farther,” Tylar warned. He felt it inside him. A stirring down deep.

Pupp lowered his fiery muzzle toward his mark. Somehow Tylar knew before the nose reached him. He tensed. He felt the naethryn writhe inside him, rising as Pupp lowered.

Then the molten muzzle sank through his mark as if through shadow.

Dart gasped behind him, echoed by the others.

Then Pupp vanished from his chest, weight and burn gone.

Everyone glanced at Dart.

She pointed down to her legs. “Something spooked Pupp. Probably the naethryn. He’s hiding behind my cloak.”

“But where’s the stone?” Brant asked.

“He dropped it.” She pointed to Tylar’s mark. “Down there.”

Tylar reached to his chest, to his mark, but found only skin and breastbone. He lay his palm atop it. The stone was inside him.

Falling…

He sensed the rock tumbling into a deep well.

Then something rumbled even deeper inside him, a rushing up, a monstrous pressure building behind his rib cage. “Everyone! Get flat!”

When the rising pressure struck the falling rock, the impact shattered through him. Tylar’s body leaped full off the boards, back arched, balanced on head and heels, arms out.

Pain and pleasure trapped him in a clenched breath.

He filled, swelling up, leaving no room for himself.

Too large…

Vision dimmed.

Then finally, like a popped cork, the pressure broke through into this world. From his chest, smoke flumed with the force of a gale out of his body. Bones broke with the passage, unmoored, torn loose.

He collapsed to the planks.

Beyond pain.

From his chest, more smoke sailed high. A storm of black and white, churning, mixing, coiling one to the other. Tylar noted wing and snaking neck, one black, one white, like two wyrms mating or fighting in midair.

Aethryn and naethryn.

Between them, a flickering lick of green flame danced and lashed, as if this were the fire that smoked them into existence. But Tylar knew it to be the burn of poison, Chrism’s hatred given form. The two wyrms writhed around this core of flame.

At the very top of the column, a star glittered, reflecting the flame from a thousand facets.

The black diamond.

Slowly, as the two wyrms writhed, they smothered the fire between them, squeezed and strangled. The flame lost its brightness, the fierce flickering slowed, and in another few moments, it expired with a final waft of putrefaction.

With the fire gone, the smoke swirled with less violence, and the two creatures, both lost parts of the same whole, coiled and churned, trying to become one again-and failing-forever missing the third.

Tylar heard two voices in his head, two expressions of grief, more thought than word.

LOVE LOST HELP HOPE

LOST LOSS PAIN FURY

FREE FAITH LIFE WEEP

FIGHT BITTER WEEP LOSS

The litany flowed through his head, but was felt more with the heart, two views of the same pain and loss, neither able to get the other to understand, to comprehend, too foreign to the other, yet so alike.

He recognized the first voice, one tinged with regret and hope. It had spoken to him before, revealing itself as naethryn. But the other voice was more embittered, laced with fury and cold inflexibility. He knew who the newcomer was, summoned by the stone, the smoky wyrm in white.

Meeryn’s aethryn.

Another voice reached him through his pain, one of urgency and plain word.

“Bloody yourself, Tylar!” Rogger said. “Call back your dog!”

As the thief placed a dagger in Tylar’s gnarled grip, he stared up. The whirl of two wyrms had become more heated as each tried to get the other to understand that which the other could not comprehend, so close but still sundered, the frustration building toward fury.

Tylar dragged the heel of his hand across the dagger’s fine edge. He felt the bite of steel. Blood ran down his arm as he lifted it. He snatched at the smoky tether, feeling the fleshy substance, igniting fire under his palm. Then as usual, the brilliance shot outward and back, consuming the tangle and pulling it back. It fell back to him with the weight of water, crushing him to the planks, knocking the air from him.

Then it was all gone.

A hand reached out and snatched a rock falling from the sky. Brant had captured back his stone as it fell back into this world.

Tylar sat up, inhaling a deep breath, his strength returned.

No pain in his side. He used Rogger’s dagger to cut the wraps from his hand. The soiled scraps fell away, revealing straight and strong fingers. He flexed his fist and rolled to his feet. His knee-both knees-lifted him smoothly.

The others stared at him.

Cured.

Off across the dark forest, a scream echoed.

Rogger glanced back. “Looks like we’ve waked another beast.”

Tylar bent down, retrieved the bladeless gold hilt, and held out a hand toward Brant. The boy passed him the stone. Dart had already freshened it back to a diamond with her blood.

Tylar stared at Brant, the echoes of the aethryn and naethryn still stirring through him. He remembered Brant’s words when he held Keorn’s skull. With the stone at his throat, he’d spoken in two different voices, as if in argument.

HELP THEM…

LET THEM ALL BURN…

FREE THEM…

LET THEM ALL BURN…

But they weren’t his own words. He knew that now.

Through skull and stone, Brant had spoken with the voice of Keorn’s naethryn and aethryn. Two sundered parts just as conflicted. One seeking salvation, the other ruination. Naethryn and aethryn. Two parts of a whole.

Tylar lifted sword and stone.

He felt no such conflict within himself.

He slammed pommel to diamond. The blade shimmered into substance. He heard the daemon’s cry echo away.

He answered silently- I’m coming -and turned to the group.

Though hale, Tylar was only one man against a host of ravening rogues and a wraithed daemon, leashed together for a common purpose-all set against him.

And even with Rivenscryr, the hope for victory was slim.

Still, Tylar remembered Dart’s earlier words, how a sword was only as strong as the man who wielded it. But what she had yet to learn was that a man was only as strong as those who stood by his side.

He stared at those here.

And he could imagine victory…against any odds.

All was lost.

Kathryn ran down the stairs as Stormwatch Tower quaked. The ice had reached their battlements. She had watched the outer towers fall, the wall tumbled and broken. Only one structure still stood.

But for how long?

Overhead, loud crashes echoed, glass shattered. Then an exceptionally loud boom rattled the stairs, deafening. But afterward, she heard a noise like a rumble of thunder, accompanied by a cacophony of rattling and smashing resounds. Something was coming, behind her, from on high.

Kathryn drank more shadows and sped down for the next landing. Flying around a corner, she spotted two figures hurrying upward, slinking along one wall. They glimpsed her in a wash of shadows. The girl raised a fist to her throat. The boy stepped forward with a sword, plainly borrowed, from the way it shook.

Raising an arm, Kathryn yelled, “Get off the stairs! NOW!”

Laurelle responded immediately, despite her momentary panic. She grabbed the young wyld tracker’s arm and hauled him up. They reached the landing at the same time and ducked off the stairs.

Not a moment too soon.

An avalanche of stone bricks tumbled past in a deadly chute, rattling away, bouncing a few stones down the hallway. Kathryn herded Laurelle and Kytt back, then swept around with her cloak.

“What are you still doing out?” she yelled, her ears ringing from the clatter of rocks. “Why didn’t you respond to the gong?”

Laurelle strode beside her. “We were down below with Master Orquell.”

Kathryn lifted a hand to her brow. “Yes…yes, Delia told me.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Where is the master?”

“Dead. Sacrificed himself to stifle the witch’s power.”

Kathryn remembered Mirra faltering, her staff’s green fire dying.

Laurelle continued, speaking in a rush. “Then there were groundshakes below. The Masterlevels crumbled, and large sections collapsed. We ran. If it hadn’t been for Kytt’s nose, we wouldn’t have found a way out, but a part of the lower level had collapsed into the cellars. We were able to climb up.”

Laurelle suddenly grabbed Kathryn’s sleeves. “We saw some of the black knights-but they ran from our torches.”

Kathryn hurried them toward one of the entrances to the Grand Court. “They’ve been routed. But we have larger concerns.”

Another tower-shaking boom echoed from above. It seemed Lord Ulf was tearing down Stormwatch, one level at a time, starting from the top.

“I thought the groundshakes below had stopped,” Laurelle said, ducking a bit as the thunder echoed away.

“They did. This is something even more dire.”

At last, the doors to the Grand Court arched ahead, framed in black obsidian, topped by a faceted chunk of rock that represented the diamond on their sword’s pommel. She hurried forward and pounded a fist on the closed door.

A commotion sounded and a voice called out. “Who goes there?”

“Castellan Vail!”

A moment later, a bar scraped, and the door swung open to a cavernous space, the tiered amphitheater of the Grand Court. Fires blazed. And the heart of Tashijan quaked with screams, shouts, crying, bustling. It was packed nearly shoulder to shoulder.

Kathryn bulled a path to the stairs that led down toward the bottom of the amphitheater. Laurelle and Kytt followed in her wake. It was slow going.

Then a pair of the knights joined them, shouting, “Make room for the castellan! Make room!”

The seas parted, and they made faster progress down the crowded stairs. Still, fingers touched her cloak as she descended, hopeful, fearful. She had no time to reassure them-and at the moment, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to lie to them, at least not well.

Below, Kathryn spotted Argent and Delia, along with the large mass of Hesharian and the bronze form of Gerrod. Several other Council masters gathered around the central pit. Hearthstone, the fiery core of Tashijan. The ancient pit dated back to the time of human kings, but it had come to represent Tashijan’s flaming heart. The pit danced high with a fresh pyre, smoke spiraling with alchemies.

“Make room for the castellan!”

The shout echoed below. Faces turned.

Gerrod spotted her first among the surging throng. He lifted an arm. She hurried down to him, leading Laurelle and Kytt.

Reaching the floor, Argent came with Delia.

“He comes,” Kathryn said, as more booming crashes echoed, like the footsteps of a god. “Keep the fires high. Our only hope lies in the heat of our alchemies bolstering this last picket, holding our fire against Ulf’s ice.”

Gerrod nodded. “We’ve added loam alchemies to strengthen the walls, too, but-” He shook his head.

She reached for his arm and squeezed, wishing it was not just armor that met her touch. “We will hold strong…and not just with our alchemies.”

A violent quake rattled, sounding as if all of the tower above had crashed atop them. Kathryn looked up, willing it all to hold. Just a little longer.

Large chunks of plaster and rock cracked from the roof and tumbled to smashing ruin among the tiers. People scattered, amid screams and blood.

Overhead a massive block of stone broke free like a rotted tooth. It fell straight at them. Kathryn shouldered Gerrod to the side. Masters scattered. Argent grabbed Delia’s arm as she gaped upward. But she was still wobbly on her feet from the blow to her head.

As Argent pulled, she tripped down to a knee.

“Delia!”

The stone tumbled at her.

In a swirl of cloak, Argent clenched her arm in both of his hands and threw her bodily, wildly clear, spinning off a heel. He dove after her, but a moment too late. Even shadows were sometimes too slow.

Argent leaped, but the chunk of roof shattered across his legs, slamming him to the stone floor. He lay flat, unmoving.

“Father!” Delia cried and crawled over to him.

An arm shifted, a hand wiped rock dust from the floor. Blood welled and spread from beneath the rock. Shouts echoed. Masters hurried forward.

But it was his daughter that took his hand.

“Don’t leave me,” she said. “Not again…”

His chin shifted, and he moaned. “Never.”

Then he lay still.

“I wish I had more practice,” Rogger said.

“You’ll do fine,” Tylar assured him. He glanced back at the others.

The flitterskiff floated a quarter league from the island in the clear channel again, out of the clogged choke. The others crouched, hands firmly on the rail. Dart shared his bench, clutching a hand to his swordbelt. He felt the tremble in her arm.

Each had a duty this night. And though fear shone bright in all their eyes, so did determination. Satisfied, he twisted forward and squeezed Rogger’s arm, sharing friendship and certainty.

“Go.”

With a nod, Rogger twisted the flow of trickling alchemy to full. “Hold tight!”

The paddles to either side churned the waters into a boil. The flitterskiff leaped forward like a startled pony. It blew across the waters, rising, lifting its keel, winds whipping the hood from Tylar’s cloak.

He tugged it back up, ducking lower.

The skiff skimmed on its paddle tips, racing along the channel. Rogger hit the first bend around a hillock, but he was too gentle with the wheel. They swung wide, almost burying their bow in a tangle of knotted roots. He pulled harder, tilting the skiff up almost on one row of paddles, and then they were away.

The channel twisted and turned from there.

Rogger did his best, flying the skiff around fast turns, slowing, jogging, banking, and tilting. He took the last turn with a bit of a panic. The rearmost starboard paddle struck a stone and clipped off with a jolt of the boat. The bronze oar flew like an arrow back into the flooded woods.

Then they were in the boiling lake.

Steam rose in a fierce, bubbling roil. The waters glowed a fiery crimson. As they shot across the water toward the island, the heat swamped over them, dampened them with a stinging wash. The kiss of Takaminara. Behind them, steam swirled and churned in their wake.

A screech of fury erupted from the island. Green flames flickered off the rocky spars, fanned by the beat of rising wings.

Rogger shot toward the island, a flittering spear of wood and bronze. He aimed straight for one of the pinnacles, as if he intended to ram it. “Get ready!”

Tylar shifted up, drawing Dart under his cloak, one arm snaked under her shoulders. “Both hands,” he told her.

Two hands locked onto his swordbelt.

“Now!” Rogger yelled.

The thief yanked on the wheel, and twisted the nose to the left, banking high. Their thrust still carried them toward the island, broadside first now. They slowed.

But not Tylar.

With shadows heavy in his cloak and Dart under his arm, he leaped over the starboard rail and flew like a dark raven toward the sandy beach.

Behind him, Rogger burnt more alchemies and the flitterskiff flew off like a frightened sparrow, skimming out and away from the island.

Tylar landed in a rolling tumble, protecting Dart with his limbs until they fell into the shadows of the rocky spar. He buried them both in the darkness and some scrabbled bushes.

He watched the flitterskiff skim out into the cooler waters of the lake and vanish to the right, intending to circle the island and retreat back the way they’d come in.

But not alone.

A wailing cry of a hunter pierced the night. Tylar did not dare look. They had leaped from the boat into the shadows, and they needed to remain out of sight. Before flying here, Tylar had smeared his blood all over the boat’s railing. His scent would be ripe on the skiff, a bait trolled through these dark waters and away.

But had they hooked their big fish?

Another shriek and the green firelight flickered with fury. Tylar heard the beat of heavy wings, rising from the island. Distantly, he heard Rogger shout.

“If you want to bite this arse, you’re gonna have to catch it first!”

The flap of leather and bone followed Rogger’s call.

Tylar waited another two breaths. The goal had been for Rogger to lure the winged guard away. The daemon’s power came from the island. If Tylar could stamp out the flame here, then the wraithed ghawl would be easier to manage, stripped of much of its Dark Grace.

Still, what would they find here? There was only one way to find out.

“Let’s go, and remember if I say-”

“- run, I’m supposed to run and hide,” Dart mumbled. “I know.”

He hadn’t wanted to bring Dart, but he had no way of knowing if her blood might be needed for the sword. Too much was unknown still about the blade, and he had gods to set free. It would not do to find himself standing with a bladeless hilt in his hand.

A screech echoed over the waters.

And who was to say being on the boat was any safer?

Tylar stood up and slid Rivenscryr from its sheath. “Keep to my shadows. I’ll keep us cloaked as much as possible.”

Already at his hip, she shuffled closer still.

He set out around the rock. The island had fallen into a hushed silence. All he heard was a flicker of hungry flame, a few scrapes, and what sounded like rattled chains.

He crept another step when he realized something was missing here.

Seersong.

When they’d first spied upon the island from across the lake, he had heard a few faint chords. A lone woman singing softly, full of sorrow. But now nothing. What had happened?

Tylar feared what this might portend.

Leading the way, he stepped past the granite spar and into the green firelight. The pyre rose at the island’s center. It cast no warmth, only a sick feverish tint to the skin, oily and foul. It splattered its light against stone and rock.

Tylar lifted his cloak against it, sensing the immense well of power here. He kept back from it, edging around the central square. Low stone buildings, all stacked brick and slabbed roofs, ringed the edges. The doorways were open, no windows. He made sure they kept clear from those dark openings, too.

He heard stone scrape inside-and again a rattle of iron.

Once they were among the crown of pinnacles, the firelight revealed carvings on the inner surfaces of the spars: of men and women at work, tilling fields, leading beasts of burden by yoke. One spar held what appeared to be a great tangled battle with spear and ax, decorated with limbless bodies, and staked heads that were too painful a reminder of Saysh Mal. Another seemed to depict great acts of carnal passion: feasts, debauchery, rutting bodies in every pose.

He stepped between Dart and that view.

Crossing deeper, he searched around him. Here was an ancient human settlement, long before even the human kings rose, stretching to a more distant time. Here is where the human Cabalists had chosen to set up their wicked forge, believing the lies of the naethryn Cabal, to end the tyranny of the gods, to return to the majesty of human rule.

Tylar turned his eyes away, back to the ring of stone buildings. By now, he had circled to the far side of the fire. Here rose the largest of the buildings. Firelight glowed out its door. Not the green poison of this pyre, but a regular hearth.

He approached, but motioned Dart to one side of the door. He led with Rivenscryr in hand. The door was low, requiring him to duck in order to peer inside. A small pit in the room’s center glowed with a few wan flames. It illuminated six stone slabs, radiating out from the fire. A single small figure lay atop each bed, draped in a gray robe, stained and ragged.

Tylar smelled the blood.

It flowed over the slabs and pooled at their feet. A few trickles dribbled toward the fire in the room. A fresh large drop rolled along one of the rivulets and extended its reach by a tiny measure.

He entered but pointed back. “Stay near the door. Watch the square.”

Dart stepped within the shelter of the threshold, but she faced outward.

Tylar crossed to one of the beds. The figure was a girl, surely no more than fifteen, straight blond hair, long to the shoulder. She appeared no different than any young girl, except for two things about her neck. Under her chin, her throat bulged out, like a frog in mid-croak.

One of the songstresses.

He looked into her open eyes, such a sweet face for such a font of misery. But was she to blame? Such children were born of Dark Grace, against their will, tainted by black alchemies to become these sirens of Grace. Were they any freer than those they bound?

And then there was one last horror found at her throat.

A ragged slice drawn clean and deep. Its edges had peeled back as her lifeblood poured out. Tylar’s toe nudged one of the blades, a shard of obsidian in a bronze handle. It lay near the girl’s slack fingers.

She had cut her own throat.

He stepped to the next, and the next-all the same.

All the songstresses.

Dead.

He touched one cheek. Still warm. The deaths had occurred only moments before. He remembered the forlorn notes of song he had heard drifting over the lake. Maybe it hadn’t truly been seersong, only one last whisper into the night, a lone child knowing what she must do.

Tylar stared across the ruin here.

“Why?” he whispered to them.

The one word encompassed two questions.

Why had they killed themselves? Were they no longer needed? Had Lord Ulf ordered them to take their lives? And if so, what did that portend for Tashijan?

But there was a larger question locked in that single whispered word. He stared across the slabs. Every face that stared up toward the roof, wide-eyed and blind in death, was the same. As with Meylan’s group. All identical. But Meylan and her sisters were all Wyr-born.

Tylar’s blood went cold. He knew the truth. So were these children . They’d been birthed in the same Wyr’s forges, identical songstresses.

Why?

Dart stepped deeper into the room, a warning tone in her voice.

“Tylar-”

He turned his back on the horror here and hurried back to her side. She pointed, drawing him down so he might see better.

All around the ring, they crept out of doorways, many on hands and knees, others sliding on bellies, others hunkered into beaten postures. Had they sensed the winged guard was gone? Or was it just Tylar’s trespass?

They came out of their stone dens, naked, covered in mud and their own filth. Hair caked in bile, limbs starved to bone, and many of those broken and healed crooked. But all their eyes, staring up, staring over, staring at nothing, glowed with Grace.

Here were the rogues.

What was left of gods treated brutally.

Twelve in all.

They clawed from their warrens, chained at the ankles. One began to wail at the sky, then another. One woman sat outside the doorway, tugging her hair out by the fistful. Another man rocked on his knees, digging at the stone underfoot, tearing nails and flesh in his urgency.

Though freed from the seersong, they were bound even tighter now by madness, beyond even the ability to use their Grace to break their chains.

Tylar remembered Rogger’s description of tanglebriar, how if you yanked the weed, its roots only dug deeper and spread wider. How long had these been rooted with seersong? With the loss of the songstresses, something worse than raving was left behind-mindless agony and an imprisonment far worse than chain and stone, locked forever in your own horror. He had seen what such madness had wrought in Saysh Mal-not just to those around them but to the gods themselves.

He pictured Miyana stepping into fire. The same as her brother.

I want to go home.

Tylar stepped out. No one noted him. He had come to free these rogues. And so he would.

Lifting his sword, he stalked out.

“Faster!” Brant yelled.

Rogger cursed and raced the flitterskiff around another bend. The daemon had closed upon them again. They were burdened by tangle and choke. The ghawl had open air.

Their only advantage lay in dense cover and darting turns.

But they were rapidly losing even that slim lead.

Rogger had taken the last turn too sharply and sheered three paddles off on a shoulder of rock. The skiff jostled, and Rogger had to fight the wheel to hold them steady. And now they were heading into a familiar section of the wood, less dense with areas of open canopy.

Malthumalbaen knelt in the boat’s stern, balancing one hand on the rail, holding aloft a thick branch, more a log, with the other. And Brant appreciated the giant’s skill with it. They had already come close to death a few moments back. The daemon had dropped like a diving hawk at them, crashing through a sparse section of canopy.

A quick swing of that log, and he’d batted it aside. It had crashed into the muck and weed. They had cheered-but in a storm of wing and claw, it had burst up, showering filth, climbing and leaping back into the air to continue its hunt.

And it was upon them again already. It flapped above the canopy, closing the distance with a savage screech of triumph.

Rogger did his best. The flitterskiff raced but in a rattling limp compared to its effortless flight. It was over for them. Had they bought Tylar and Dart enough time? Once the beast ravaged them, it would discover the ruse and return to the island in a furious rage.

They had run out of ways to confound the daemon.

They were too few, too limited.

Too few?

An idea dawned. Maybe not.

Brant twisted back to Rogger and told him where to go.

The thief nodded. “You have a deliciously evil streak, boy. That’s why I love you.”

Brant faced around. He grabbed his longbow, supplied by the Wyr, and readied his arrows. The giant came next to him.

“You want me to just throw my log?”

“When I tell you.” Brant worked fast, fighting the jostle as Rogger swung the boat toward the new target. It was time the daemon learned how all life in the wood was connected by a dance of predator and prey. Heartless and hard-but nonetheless perfect.

This was what Brant had been taught as a boy.

The Way.

“Here we are!” Rogger said.

And not a moment too soon.

The daemon appeared in a break in the canopy overhead, turned on a wing, ready to dive.

“Now!” Brant bellowed and arched back. He pulled hard on his bowstring. Oil dripped from his arrow’s shaft to his fingers.

Malthumalbaen threw his log at the neighboring tree, then leaned down and touched Brant’s arrow with a burning piece of straw.

The shaft ignited as Brant let loose the string. The arrow shot high, arcing a fiery trail up through the hole in the canopy. The daemon wraith had begun its final dive.

Brant’s arrow struck true.

From the neighboring tree, woken by the giant’s log crashing through the limbs of their roost, a thousand white bats took to wing, searching for the attacker. Malthumalbaen wisely threw his piece of flaming straw into the water.

The bats noted the only other flame, honed from centuries of hunting.

In their skies.

In their territory.

Impaled upon a winged trespasser.

Brant’s arrow did nothing to discourage the daemon, but the thousand bats did, churning up like smoke through the hole in the canopy.

The daemon’s dive tumbled as wings struck bats, and thousands upon thousands of fangs tore at skin and eyes. It twisted in midair, plagued at every turn, unable to escape the swirling white cloud. It fled higher, shedding the cloud for a moment. The rush of air fanned the impaled arrow’s flame.

In that moment, the daemon hesitated, turned once on a wingtip. Then with a wail of fury, it swung away.

Back toward the island.

Rogger watched it leave. “It knows about Tylar’s trespass.”

Brant stood next to Rogger, shouldering his bow. “We did all that we could.”

Rogger looked above. Overhead, the swirl of bats chased after the slower-flapping daemon, following its flame. A cry of rage flowed back, tinged by pain.

“And those little buggers will slow it down a bit more for us.”

Malthumalbaen sank to the bench. “I could almost like those bats now. Especially fried in pepperseed oil.”

Tylar stood amid the carnage.

The fire at his back had dimmed to flickers of green flame. With each rogue he slew, more fuel for the pyre died. Somehow each god’s lifeforce was forged to the flames, some dread blood alchemy, forced upon them by the song. And like the chains that bound their ankles, they were unable to escape-not while they lived.

It was up to Tylar to break that curse, too.

In the only way he knew how.

Their bodies lay where they fell. He made each of their deaths swift.

He felt the tenth no less than the first-especially as he finally learned the truth of Rivenscryr.

He stepped to the eleventh rogue and lifted his sword. It was a woman of fine bone, revealed by her sunken skin. A god might not die, but they could eternally starve. She stared up at him. She did not wail. She had bitten off her tongue some time ago, and in the horror of godhood, it had yet to grow back. How many tongues had she bitten off? Had she done it to silence her cries or out of hunger?

He met her gaze and found nothing there, a burned shell, waiting to be released. Like all the others…or at least those who still had eyes.

Tylar heaved back his sword and swung it sharply.

Graced steel cleaved flesh and bone with hardly a shudder of the hilt.

Still, as Rivenscryr touched flesh, the last flicker of life entered the blade, drawn up the steel by Keorn’s black diamond, drawing together in that exact moment all that had been sundered-flesh, naethryn, and aethryn.

And slaying all three.

That was the final truth.

No god had truly died on Myrillia in all its four thousand years since the great Sundering. Parts certainly had died. Meeryn. Chrism. But these were only a sliver of the whole. What had died before had left spirit in the naether and the aether. Like the undergod inside Tylar. Or Chrism’s naethryn banished from Myrillia back to its dark underworld. They abided.

Even Miyana and Keorn.

No god died truly and wholly.

Until this night.

As the stone of Rivenscryr drew all parts together for that fleeting last spark of life, the blade cut it short, ending all.

The rogue god’s head rolled toward the fire. The body slumped.

Truly and finally dead.

“Lillani,” Tylar whispered.

It was the other cruelty of the sword. What was it about a name? As all parts joined and the raving of millennia snuffed out with each death, a name rang through the blade, full of joy. Then gone.

Tylar had learned all those names.

He stepped toward the twelfth and final.

A god who took the shape of an older boy, sixteen, seventeen. Now he was more a feral wolf than boy. He had rended his manhood to shreds with his nails, and he frothed at the mouth. One leg was broken, the one snagged in iron. He must have fought his chain with the same ferocity as he had fought seersong. But he had lost both battles. Forever trapped.

Tylar lifted Rivenscryr, hating the sword in that moment.

Across the woods, he heard a wailing screech of the daemon. He had heard it echo periodically as it hunted the forest for the flitterskiff, searching for Tylar’s blood. But now it came closer. Another call followed, confirming. It swept back toward the island.

As he lifted his sword, a voice spoke behind him.

It was not Dart. She crouched by the stone house where the songstresses lay cold on their stone beds. He should not have brought her here. She sat, knees up, face buried between them.

She knew it was a mercy, too. But that didn’t mean she had to watch.

The voice came from the flames.

“You are an Abomination,” Lord Ulf said, whispering ice through the flames. “Here you prove it.”

Tylar stared into the fire. “I do what must be done. Forced by malice and corruption.”

“You kill all,” Ulf said, with a note of confusion and wariness, plainly unsure how Tylar had accomplished this.

“I know.”

“But why? When any blade can take a head from a god? Why kill all when madness has eaten only the one?”

Tylar had considered the same after slaying the first rogue, realizing how deep Rivenscryr cut. Still, he had moved on with his Godsword. He had remembered the war between Meeryn’s aethryn and naethryn. Forever apart. Forever incomprehensible to the other. Such fracturing when the third was forever lost was not life. Let death be death.

Also he had remembered Miyana, when the Huntress had stepped into the molten rock. Of full mind in that moment, all three, bringing back her name. She had tried to tell him, tell everyone, knowing it was denied her even then.

I want to go home.

And there was only one way to do that.

Total release.

Tylar turned his back on Ulf and stepped to the feral boy-god.

Ulf spoke behind him. “You are an Abomination!”

Tylar swung the sword, cleaving madness from the boy. “Jaffin,” he whispered to the night, naming him.

“ABOMINATION!” Ulf wailed.

Tylar turned to the fire. “No-just Godslayer.”

With the death of the last rogue, the foul pyre expired.

But not before a thread of righteous triumph sailed clear.

“You are too late…Tashijan has fallen…”

Tylar hesitated. Was it true? Was that why the songstresses were dead? Before he could weigh the words, a screech drew him full around. It dove toward the island.

“Tylar!” Dart called out, rising and stepping toward him.

“Run!” he commanded. “Inside!”

Dart backed into the songstresses’ home but stayed near the door.

Tylar gathered shadows to his cloak and shifted away from Dart’s hiding place, drawing the daemon’s attention by baring Rivenscryr, shining bright in the dark.

The daemon crashed to the island’s center, scattering ashes of the dying hearth that had given birth to him. Wings raised as it faced Tylar. Frayed and torn, the wings bled a thick ichor. A feathered arrow, charred and black, sprouted from its ribs. With the fire gone and its font of Grace stanched, the wraithed ghawl had weakened.

But like a wounded she-panther, such a beast was at its most wary, its most dangerous. Its neck lowered. It hissed at him from a fanged face that bore little resemblance to Perryl. Claws dug into stone underfoot. Wings batted at the air.

It searched, as if unsure what stoked its fury. Its masters were gone, leaving it directionless, abandoned.

Then Tylar noted something beyond the wary confusion.

Pain.

And not just from its injuries.

“Perryl…”

The word blew the creature back like a gust of wind. It landed across the cold fire in a crouch, hissing, spitting, wings held straight up. It looked ready to take to wing and flee.

“Was that why you still came?” Tylar whispered, circling the fire, his blade ready. “The beast in you wants to run, but something holds you here.”

It screeched, a note of frustration and agony, trapped in a tidal push and pull of instinct and memory.

“Perryl…”

An agonized whine streamed from somewhere deep inside the beast.

He knew why his friend had come back. Tylar lifted Rivenscryr. The blade’s flicker ignited another hiss and snap of wing. Clawed hands ripped at him through the air, savage and raving.

Still, it held back, ending its hiss with a slight mewling cry.

Fearful on every level.

Tortured and pained.

Lost between beast and man, instinct and horror.

Tylar knew what Perryl wanted of him. He saw it in his eyes. Perryl fought the beast’s instinct, to flee, to fight. But for how long? He used all the will remaining in his ilked form to hold firm, to hold steady for the blade, to beg for the same kindness Tylar had shone the rogues.

The mercy of the blade.

But Perryl could not hold out for much longer.

Tylar knew Perryl needed his help, for one last battle, one last death, one last release. Still, after so much blood on his sword, he hesitated. And that proved the cruelest act that night.

Behind Tylar, a whining and rattling erupted, the flitterskiff returning.

The noise and sudden arrival startled the beast beyond Perryl’s control. With a spread of wings, it leaped with a screech of panic-ready to flee and lose itself in the hinterlands, trapping his friend forever in horror.

Tylar swept forward, but the distance was too great even for shadow.

He had failed Perryl one last time.

But another did not.

As the daemon leaped, a flaming form burst out its chest, skewering clean through, a fiery spike through the heart, gutting it.

One last screech wailed with a lick of flame from pained lips-and the daemon fell to the stones in a tumble of wing and smoking flesh.

Pupp climbed free of the debris. Steaming with black blood, shaking his spiked mane. His eyes glowed especially bright.

Dart ran up to Tylar, one hand bloody. In the other, she held one of the songstresses’ obsidian knives.

Tylar sank to his knees beside his friend.

Suddenly all the grief whelmed through him, shaking up from a place deeper than where his naethryn swam. He dropped his sword and covered his face. The tears came in great racks of pain. Twelve names burnt into his heart. Or maybe it was because at least this one death did not bloody his hands.

Not this one…

And that was enough to save him.

Dart lowered next to him. She reached to his shoulder. “Did…did I do all right? I wasn’t sure…”

He touched her arm, swallowing hard. “You did fine, Dart…just fine.”