The sky above him roiled in green and black, as caustic steam blasted the air from the battle of the elements raging between MacQuieth and Michael, the ancient Kirsdarkenvar and the Wind of Fire. The cliff faces in the distance disappeared, swallowed by the churning seas and the smoke.
And in that moment Ashe knew he would not be able to hold on to either of the two people he was clutching when the wave reached them.
Their bodies rose on the last foreswell as the wave neared, blotting out the sun.
In the final seconds before the wave hit, Ashe recalled the look of certainty in MacQuieth’s eyes, the eyes that in the morning were blind to the world of the sun.
He may command the wind, but I am the sword.
The waters touch us all.
Kirsdarke is our sword.
From the salt in his blood the answer came.
The waters touch us all.
Kirsdarke is our sword.
I a-m the sword as well, he thought.
He opened his fingers of the hand that gripped the water-stunned Firbolg king and called on his bond to Kirsdarke.
He could feel its hilt, the only solid manifestation of the weapon when it was in the sea, brushing the tips of his fingers, at the edge of his grasp.
He clutched it, willing it to take a vaporous form, and, loosing the Bolg king for the space of a heartbeat, drove the sword into Achmed’s chest, wrapping his arm around him once more.
“Hold on to the sword!” he shouted over the thunder of the roiling sea. “Breathe!”
Ashe turned to the unconscious Rhapsody in his other arm and snapped her head back, trying to find her face in the tangle of hair and seaweed. He pressed his mouth against her blue lips, then gripped the hilt of Kirsdarke, sending all of the water in his body, all the power of the element he could summon from the raging sea around him, into the watery blade, hoping his air would transmute into Achmed as well. Drawing the water from Rhapsody’s lungs, blasting the exhalations of air through the weapon into those of the Firbolg king.
And, still clutching his wife and the impaled Firbolg king, kicked down to the depths of the sea.
The scream of the waves muted instantly into a deep rumbling thudding as he sank like the heaviest of stones, dragging the other two down with him.
Rhythmically he breathed into Rhapsody’s lungs, feeling his breath spill out of her mouth as it rose in a swirl of bubbles that were instantly lost in the dark churning water above them. His hand still grasped the sword that pierced the Bolg king, but whether Achmed was alive or not he could not determine.
Around his ears the sea bellowed in rage at the affront, the violation of the elemental battle, screaming angrily as the black fire of the demon churned on its surface, spun into its depths. He could hear the ocean’s anger, and its fear, felt in his mind its tale of the events as they unfolded, of the struggle between the two beings of flesh and element, the raging maelstrom of water against wind and an even more ancient and dark fire.
From the corner of his eye he could see the wave pass above them, felt the swells beneath it pass through his body, one with the water now, concentrating on keeping the breath in his wife’s mouth, the sword hilt one with his hand.
From the deck of the Basquela, Quinn saw the wall of water towering off the shoreline, felt the backswell, then watched in horror as, in direct controversy to nature, it began to rush toward them, into the open sea.
“About!” he screamed to the thunderstruck crew, who broke out of their rigid stares and scrambled aloft and to their posts, endeavoring to take the ship into the wind. Quinn himself could only stand at the rail, frozen, his keen sailor’s eyes wide with horror, his mind calculating the impact and the inevitability of it.
There was no escape.
“Turn her into it!” he shouted into the wind to the mate who was frantically trying to gain control of the wheel. “If it hits us amidship we’re done for!”
The blast of wind that tore around the approaching monolith of water swallowed the mate’s reply.
Quinn turned back one final time, riveted by the sight of lightning and blazing fire rolling within the tidal wave, swirling in dark colors of brimstone and blood.
In the moment before it hit the ship, Quinn could swear he saw the wave’s yawning maw, a towering face in the vertical sea of sightless black eyes and a titanic mouth screaming in demonic madness, turning the very ocean against itself.
He whispered a prayer to the god of the Deep, a sailor’s entreaty he had learned as a cabin boy, wondering dully as the deck rose into the air amid the sharp cracking and snapping of the ship being rent into pieces how the sky and the sea had become one.
When the wave passed, Ashe could feel it, sweeping out to sea, contrary to nature, flattening as it went, dissipating into nothingness. The current steadied, then resumed rolling toward the shore, eternal.
As if nothing had happened.
Slowly he kicked up to the air, dragging the Bolg king, his wife still locked against his chest in a mad embrace of breath. They broke the surface, the sun stinging their eyes, the salt excoriating their nostrils.
Ashe tilted Rhapsody back so that her head pointed to the sky and pressed her against his chest, drawing the seawater from her lungs, willing her to breathe, then turned to Achmed, still impaled on the vaporous sword. He pulled the elemental weapon from the Bolg king’s chest and slid it through his belt. He looked out to sea where the ship had been, and saw the rapidly sinking mainsail disappearing beneath the surface of the waves.
Suddenly exhausted, he lay back in the tide, holding tight to Rhapsody and Achmed, and let the eternal pull of the sea carry them to shore.
54
When Caius entered Haguefort, there was no guard at the gate, no one in the foyer, no one in the corridors or on the stairs. It was as if the keep had been abandoned in the advent of a coming hurricane.
Which, in a way, it had been.
He crept quietly through the entranceway, taking pains to not allow his footsteps to echo on the polished stone floor.
The crossbowman was making his way through the enormous dining hall when a middle-aged woman in an apron appeared in the buttery doorway; Caius shot her through the forehead one-handed without breaking his stride, and without looking back.
Berthe crumpled to the floor without a sound, the blood that pooled beneath her forehead and into her open eyes whispering quietly as it bled.
Caius walked silently through the corridors, past the beautiful displays of armor and antiquities, looking for anyone who might have been the husband of his master’s quarry, but finding nothing but empty silence.
Until he entered the Great Hall.
At the far end, beneath the tall windows, a man was sitting in a heavy wooden chair at a similarly heavy wooden table, sorting through parchment scrolls. When he looked up, their eyes met, and Caius froze.
It was the soldier he had seen in his dreams, the crippled man who rode in a high-backed saddle through the burning leaves swirling on the forest wind to rescue the woman his master sought.
The man who had killed his twin.
Caius could read the man’s thoughts as he raised his crossbow and sighted it at the soldier’s heart. The soldier’s first glance had gone to the windows behind him, trying to determine if escape through them was possible, the thought immediately discarded because of the height. Next the soldier glanced around for another exit, but there was none between Caius and him. He could see the futility register as the last thought came into his head.
There was no escape.
Generally Caius never spoke to his victims, determining conversations with the imminent dead to be a waste of energy. But in this case, the look on the face of the man who sat behind the desk was so insolent, his expression so hard, that he made an exception.