But he could not force any of it from his mind.
Because the F’dor remembered it, too.
The demon was leafing through him. It was preparing to choose.
He stood, almost slack, on the edge, his eyes frantically scanning MacQuieth, noting with vague, detached interest that he could see a dangling hand. He appeared to have broken the old man’s arm; slashed it; one of the forearm bones jutted sharply through the skin, blood spurting quietly around it.
What kind of man seeks out a duel and brings neither armor nor sword’? he wondered.
The F’dor was at that moment asking the same question.
With a slight smile that had no joy in it, the ancient hero spoke.
“Does this mean you yourself are not already master of fire alone, Michael? A pity. Without acting as a host, on my own I have been to the soft places beneath the sea.”
The hush of this whisper quenched the wind. It took Michael a moment to realize the import of this terrible utterance.
MacQuieth knew the entrance to the Vault of the Underworld.
For the first time in years, the demon in his mind was silent, contemplating the possibilities.
In the depths of his brain, Michael felt its loyalty shift like a scale plate that had fallen to the earth with a thudding certainty.
The seneschal’s face contorted with rage.
“You want him?” he screamed. “Go to him! I will kill you both!”
He leapt on the ancient warrior, blood in his eyes.
MacQuieth opened his arms and threw them around Michael’s waist, catching him low, slamming him to the rocky ground of the promontory. As they grappled, MacQuieth stretched his mouth up so that it was just outside of Michael’s ear.
“Waste of Breath,” he said with a derisive snort. He reared back, staring down at the man beneath him on the ground.
Then he drove the jagged, exposed bone of his forearm into the seneschal’s abdomen.
Michael gasped.
With a burst of strength, a wave of energy that caught the demonic thrall off balance like a sudden swell of the sea, MacQuieth pushed as hard as he could against the rocky ground of the promontory, raising the impaled seneschal and himself to a stand at its edge.
Michael struggled for purchase, too close to bring even the ephemeral blade to bear, he smashed the Kinsman against the face with the air sword, striping his eyes with blood, gashing him open with cruel, gaping wounds from the weapon’s edge, but he could not get a grip on the ground.
Suddenly it seemed as if he were floating at the crest of surf, buoyant, without limitations, in the wake of a great rolling wave.
He saw the ground and sky flash intermittently as the cliff edge rolled closer. Michael made a final grab for the edge of the promontory and missed, swept up in the flood that was the man clinging to his body, piercing his flesh with the warrior’s own bone, violating him, swallowing his demonic soul.
Knocking Tysterisk from his hand.
Michael felt darkness swallow his mind as the power of the wind sucked from his body and soul in one horrific rending sound.
He could feel in the recesses of his mind the demon searching madly for a different host, anything to flee to, but MacQuieth had made certain that escape was impossible; even the horses had been left too far away to refugee into.
Through the pain Michael tried to call to the wind to hold him aloft, but it barely slowed their descent. It was as if the ocean itself already weighed him down.
His scream blended with the howl of the wind and was lost in the fall to the rocks below.
Achmed pitched at the crest of the wave that caught him, flailing helplessly in the wide expanse of the sea.
Don’t panic, he willed himself. Don’t panic.
The overwhelming immensity of the waves caught him, cloaking his senses, stinging his skin like acid. He struggled not to breathe, not to succumb, trying to resist the torrent that held him, knowing if he could just relax long enough to get out to sea the waves would calm and he would be able to float.
But he didn’t have it in him.
The endless green water closed over his head; the myriad vibrations that assailed his senses every waking moment suddenly went silent, replaced by the muted noise, the deep, murky thudding of the sea that now enclosed him like the sky.
The last hazy thought in Achmed’s head before the breath was squeezed out of him was a memory from the old world. It was the recollection of a day when, on horseback and girded in full chain mail, a bridge had given way beneath him, tossing him and his mount into the great river that bisected the Island, swollen and roaring with the rains of spring. It was the closest he had ever come to death that was not of his own choosing, and the panic, the helplessness as his body was flung about in a flood of confusion came rushing back to him now, closing the darkness in around him.
He was losing consciousness when a firm, strong grip that seemed to grow ever more solid caught him by the neck and dragged him up out of the quiet green depths and into the cold, bright realm of the air again.
“Peace,” Ashe said, “I have you. Float now.”
The two men hovered for what seemed like forever, watching the cliff in the distance anxiously, bobbing in the rolling waves.
Ashe stretched out his draconic senses, trying to find a likely place to make landfall. In dismay he watched, holding Achmed’s head above the surface of the water, as an indelible image flashed into his mind’s eye.
Two falling men were locked in mortal and immortal combat, a demonic shadow in the breech between them. Wedged together in body, bone impaling flesh, and locked in spirit, a bridge of black fire and evil from before the dawn of Time, the entity that had once been Michael was flailing desperately, struggling to separate himself from the grimly determined Kirsdarkenvar, whose ancient mien was set in an aspect of concentrated calm. As the bodies pitched off the cliff, just before they impacted the rocks below, Ashe was knocked momentarily senseless by the wave of elemental power that had entered the sea, merging wind and water and dark fire in a miasma too overwhelming for his dragon senses to bear. He struggled to hang on to consciousness and braced for the impact of the tidal wave that was rising from where the two had fallen.
A plume of steam and black fire shot into the sky; the sea at the foot of the cliff boiled to its depths, lighting the cliff face and covering the surface of the ocean with a rapidly approaching wave of froth.
“Hang on,” Ashe said to the Bolg king as the swell approached; it was half as high as the cliff, churning madly as it came.
Ahead of the wave a body tumbled, rolling along the crest of a foreswell, curled around something buoyant that kept dragging it up again.
“Gods,” Ashe whispered, treading water, clinging to Achmed as the wave approached. “Oh, gods. Take a breath.”
He dove, with Achmed in tow, swimming parallel to the current, knifing through the water as the first shock of waves swelled underneath them, then passed.
The dragon in his blood, primed by the blast of power, had caught a flash of golden hair in the wreckage that was being dragged out to sea.
Faced with a lack of free hands, and the need to hold up a drowning man, catch his wife, or lose the weapon to which his soul was tied, without hesitation Ashe let go of the sword he had carried as Kirsdarkenvar, allowing it slip into the spinning green depths. He reached out and snagged the ratty mass floating in the wake of the wave and turned it over quickly.
“Oh gods,” he gasped, shaking the stunned Dhracian’s arm. “Rhapsody.”
A larger foreswell to the oncoming wall of water broke over them, death’s harbinger. Awash in a buoyant green world that spun around him, Ashe dragged his wife’s limp body against his chest, holding her in the crook of his arm, struggling to hang on to the Firbolg king, who was only semiconscious and trying not to flounder.