Chapter 100
Somehow managing to draw his revolver as he flew through the air, Milar squeezed off several shots. And before his back slammed with a hollow echo into the concrete floor of the waste depot, a cry sounded from the windows of the neighboring buildings.
Captain Pnev had hit his target. It had likely been an accident—or maybe the Eternal Angels had guided his bullet personally, because hitting even the sky in such a situation would have been difficult, especially for an ordinary human.
As his shoulder blades skidded across the rough concrete, Milar wheezed involuntarily. Despite the pain of his fall, he still held the entrance in his sights. But Aloaeiol and Ardan hadn’t been standing idle.
The mutant dragged the captain into the cover of the brick cube with her left hand and snatched something from her belt with her right. Then, after tearing off a simple wax seal with her teeth, she hurled it forward. A slender charge, no larger than an ice-cream cone, hissed, and thick, gray clouds billowed through the air. The bullets whizzing toward them left narrow holes in the smoke for an instant, but the fresh surges of it soon repaired the obscuring barrier.
The lead hornets that broke through, instead of finding their quarry, slammed into shimmering, translucent discs conjured by Ardan. The moment the first shot had rung out, the young man had struck his staff against the floor, and the Orlovsky’s Shield spell (this was the very same Orlovsky after whom the Avenue had been named) had manifested twelve discs, saving the captain’s body from acquiring a surplus of holes.
“We need to go!” Aloaeiol shouted, leaping away from the passageway and pressing her back against the wall.
Milar and Ardan, around whom the remaining seven magical barriers were orbiting, also sprang away from the doorless passage. The young man stood a little farther off, while Milar, like Aloaeiol, pressed his back flat against the brick.
Both captains moved so identically that it wasn’t hard to guess that they’d been trained to do so. That was interesting and begged the question: had Ardi accepted Mshisty’s offer, would they have taught him something similar as well?
What strange thoughts to have during a firefight...
Perhaps he was having them because, to the young man’s great misfortune, this was far from his first time finding himself trying to survive a hail of blazing lead?
“We can’t!” Milar bellowed over the ceaseless roar of the gunfire. “If they’ve set an ambush, that means they haven’t found what they’re looking for!”
“Eternal Angels, Pnev!” Aloaeiol shrieked as another bullet, slamming into the wall, blasted sharp masonry fragments from the far side—their side—slicing the mutant’s cheek. “The only thing we’ll find here are our own obituaries!”
They built things well in the Empire, and with conviction. Everything from brick factories to... arms factories. The brickwork of the waste depot was holding for now, but who knew what the unknowns had in their arsenal.
“Ard!” Milar shoved his partner’s shoulder. “Stop standing there like a post! Find that thing!”
Ardan nodded and, leaving the captains to guard the smoke-filled entrance, turned to face the mounds of refuse. If the documents hadn’t been found, then these were not the Puppeteers. They were someone else. Why was Ardan so certain of this? For the simple reason that the documents really must have borne a mark created by the art of the Aean’Hane.
The young man closed his eyes and steadied his breathing, opening his mind to the true face of creation.
*
“Son of a bitch!” Milar snarled as another bullet not only punched through the brickwork, but bored clean through the breach left by its predecessor and, ricocheting off the floor, was reduced to lead dust by the magical disc that caught it.
The captain pressed his eye to the hole in the masonry (they did say that lightning and bullets never struck the same place twice) and stuck his hand around the corner to fire off a shot.
Where was he shooting? Somewhere over there. An excellent direction, clearly.
“Stop wasting ammunition, you idiot!” Aloaeiol snarled.
Milar tried to curse at her in return, but his attempt to snap back ended with his very first shot. The mutant was right. Through the smoke, he couldn’t even tell whether he had been firing toward the two utility buildings servicing the incineration plant or simply blasting away in the direction of the street.
One could only hope that if the Eternal Angels had sent some poor soul out in the dead of night to this accursed corner of the city, they had, upon hearing the first shots, hurried to flee. And that Milar’s bullet hadn’t found an innocent...
Damn!
Suddenly, the gunfire fell silent. Perhaps the people who’d set the ambush had realized the same thing as Aloaeiol.
“Lawmen!” A hoarse, growling, guttural voice shouted. It sounded as though someone had stripped the casing from a drum and was striking the inner shell with a bat.
The two captains exchanged glances. Milar had been dealing with Firstborn far too often of late, and Aloaeiol... Well, she was presumably familiar with them as well. One way or another, they both easily identified the voice of an orc.
“Tusker!” Milar shouted, gesturing Aloaeiol toward the position directly in front of the exit.
The mutant nodded and, in absolute silence, took her place before the torn-off hinges. Dropping to her right knee, she drew an oversized revolver—too large for a human hand—and braced her elbow against her left knee.
“Lawmen,” the voice rumbled again, vibrating with its own power. “Hand over what you found. You guards don’t need this kind of trouble.”
Milar silently thanked the current situation in the city. Right now, most guards did indeed travel in military trucks, while Second Chancery operatives had all but vanished from the city, manning stationary posts or reinforcing escort details for the nation’s top officials. So, it was hardly surprising that the orcs had mistaken them for simple guards.
“And what if we haven’t found anything?” Milar cast his line out, hoping to reel in something useful.
The fact that the orcs had mistaken them for guards still didn’t explain why they had assumed anyone would be here at all. At this particular time. On this particular night.
Damn it all!
Ard had been right.
If Aloaeiol had been watching them for three days, who could say that the orcs hadn’t done so as well? And if they had... then he and Ard had been mistaken. What they had perceived as the mutant’s hasty attempt to hide the envelope hadn’t been that at all! Quite the opposite—that brief vision of the Tazidahian tossing the documents into the garbage chute had, in fact, been part of the plan. And him going up to the roof to check what was happening had been nothing more than him following orders!
The mutant might’ve thought that the Black House’s Daggers had been planning a raid to install some piece of equipment or otherwise conduct reconnaissance. And at that moment, the mutant could have taken advantage of the developing situation to create a perfect alibi for himself! And better still—should the Black House’s operation be disrupted, he would earn credit with his own superiors. That way, he would remain not only undetected but, in the event of any investigation, he would be asked far fewer questions.
But if things had played out like that... If a third party had been expecting the envelope at the incineration plant, then why the corpses?
Because there was always a snag in every plan. If the envelope did indeed bear an Aean’Hane mark, then the orcs had needed their own wielder of the art to find it. And he might not have reached the city in time, or... been at the right place at the right time for a thousand possible reasons.
And so, the third party, after several days of fruitless searching (as indicated by the corpses, which were far from fresh), had realized it was engaged in a futile endeavor. And then the Colonel had reinforced security at the Crown Hotel. This would’ve been imperceptible to ordinary passersby, but quite apparent to interested parties because those parties knew exactly where to look.
They knew where to look...
Could the mutant have known about the magical mark? Of course! But had he understood the difference between a mark left by the Aean’Hane art and Star Magic?
And then... That meant that...
Milar, whose mind had assembled the picture before the last syllable of his own question had faded away, spun sharply toward Aloaeiol.
She needed to shoot! And step aside! Away from the entrance!
“Aloa-” Milar began to shout, reaching for his old acquaintance, but he was too late.
A pulsating, bloody vine tore through the mutant’s body. It honestly looked more like sharpened, claw-covered intestines than a vine. Perhaps that was exactly what it was.
Aloaeiol was easily lifted several meters into the air. The mutant clutched at the tendril that had pierced her. She rasped, groaned, and oozed black smoke. At last, the tendril cracked like a wide whip, and the captain was flung onto the mountains of refuse. But Milar wasn’t looking at the wounded mutant at all.
He couldn’t tear his gaze away from his partner’s face. Over the course of the night, he had already seen Ard use his art. He had heard children’s laughter among crystalline, icy trees. He’d felt the thrill of an endless winter game, where clumsy snowballs would keep flying into hoods and sneaking under clothing to lick bare skin—gently, but still with frost’s bite.
It had been a warm winter. Just like Ard himself.
But now, as the glowing white symbols once again appeared on the young man’s skin, Milar shivered. For the first time in many years, he felt something absolute. Just like back then. In that sewer, surrounded by hordes of walking dead, staring at the last round in the cylinder of his father’s honorary revolver, he had said goodbye to Elvira and the children.
Because he’d known. He’d been more certain of that fact than anything written in the holy scriptures of the Face of Light.
He was going to die.
And now, at this precise moment in time, at this damned waste incineration plant, surrounded by orcs and an unknown Star Mage who had neutralized a Black House mutant in a single strike, Milar was once again certain.
Not a single person standing outside would leave this place alive. It simply wouldn’t happen. Even if the Eternal Angels intervened, it would change nothing.
Because right now, a procession of frozen nights was dominating the world. The sun could barely graze the icy Metropolis with its rays even at noon. The capital was not ruled by the golden triangle of the Face of Light. No. Not at all.
The Sleeping Spirits ruled this night.
They were savage and ancient, and didn’t understand mercy or compassion. It was because of them that, even half a millennium later, the people of the Empire still wove the rituals of the Old Gods into their religion, dressing them up as festive, meaningless traditions.
No laughter could be heard—instead, hungry wolves howled, greeting their patroness, the Moon, and her companion, the Night. There was no more snow crunching underfoot—instead, deadfall and brush crackled, through which a hungry predator crept, having caught the scent of fear. And the warmth brought by cozy, soft clothing yielded at once to that savage cold which, come spring, in the melted snow, would leave behind the ghastly ice sculptures of those unlucky enough to learn firsthand the fierce temper of the distant mountain winter.
Winter came in many forms.
And right now, Milar was seeing a part of it he wished he could forget, but likely never would. Just as he would never be able to forget the sight of his partner’s vomit-stained clothes. The poor young man had witnessed more than many operatives who’d served for a decade.
Ard was standing among the papers strewn across the floor—tables, formulas, numbers of some kind. And between them... between them lay photographs. Even Milar could barely keep his dinner down.
They were alive... The thought battered its way through a veil of primal terror mixed with equally-primal revulsion. When the photographs were taken, they were still alive...
And perhaps—as crude and cruel as it sounded—Milar held himself back from vomiting only because the small, mutilated bodies and the eyes with screams of pain and despair frozen forever inside them belonged to the offspring of Firstborn, not humans. But for Ard, things evidently weren’t any easier to stomach because of that.
The young man raised his staff and slammed it against the floor with jarring force. And instead of the now-familiar chiming, Milar heard a crack. He remembered it from his childhood. While he’d been walking along the riverbank with his sisters and brother, the ice had cracked beneath his feet—that sound, that accursed crack, had pursued him through his nightmares for many decades after.
From beneath the young man’s staff—if one could even describe the entity that Milar saw for an instant in such a way, for it looked like a humanoid white wolf that was bearing its fangs in rage—a blizzard burst out. It made the mounds of refuse disappear as though they had been drawn in simple pencil, and the walls... It sheared them away faster than cheese disappears on a sharp grater. It broke the conveyor belt and crumpled the metal there, biting off large, icy chunks of it.
Before the captain’s pounding heart could strike again, the two-story brick box was reduced to just its ice-encased foundation. Ard slammed his staff down once more, and beneath his feet, an icy branch rose up, carrying him to the center of the inner yard. It brought him to the middle of the ring of windows bristling with rifles and face-to-face with a distinctly female figure holding a staff and wearing no regalia.
Milar came to his senses and reached for his signal medallion, but was stopped by the trembling, unexpectedly-light hand of Aloaeiol. The captain, who was covering the ugly scar where her massive wound had been with her other hand, shook her head and wiped black blood from her chin.
“Have you lost your mind?” Milar hissed, pulling her behind the only surviving brick corner—it was the one where he himself had stood; the blizzard had spared it.
“You’re the one who’s lost his mind, Milar,” Aloaeiol snarled back, wheezing as she struggled to breathe. “If the Black House sees what the great-grandson of Aror is capable of, they’ll kill him. And the protection of Her Imperial Highness won’t matter. Pavel himself will personally order the elimination. The Empire will not risk the emergence of anyone comparable in power to the Dark Lord.”
Milar jerked his hand back and growled:
“Everyone already thinks that Ard will do great things for the Empire in the future.”
“Thinking is not knowing,” Aloaeiol nodded at something beyond their orphaned shelter.
Captain Pnev leaned out and barely managed to contain the filthiest curses he knew—and he knew a fair few of them. He had once seen Mshisty and Aversky fight. And he had seen that same Aversky battle the vicious creature known as a demon. Ard might not have been able to match them yet, but he was clearly getting there.
“I’m just glad that the coldest night of the decade is already behind us,” Aloaeiol blessed herself with the sacred sign of the Face of Light.
Milar merely nodded.
“Linda Day!” He heard a voice... or perhaps it was a roaring ice storm raging among the mountain peaks.
The female mage, instead of answering Ard, merely raised her staff, and the orcs, shouting something, opened fire. But did they even stand a chance against the blood of Aror?
Milar shivered.
For some reason, he recalled the words of Lord Aversky—may the Eternal Angels receive him—that he’d casually dropped at one of their private briefings: “One day, people will no longer call Ard Egobar the great-grandson of Aror. Aror will be called the great-grandfather of Ard instead.”
By the Eternal Angels, Edward Aversky hadn’t been exaggerating. He had simply, as always, known more than everyone else... combined.
Somewhere in the north of the Empire
“Shut the door!” A once-muscular, tall man barked. And even now, beneath his sheepskin coat, mittens, and a couple dozen kilos of fat, one could still make out the contours of his former glory.
A woman with chestnut hair adjusted the burden wrapped in sturdy cloth that was slung over her shoulder. It resembled a long oar. Or perhaps it was a rifle.
“Here, feast your eyes,” the innkeeper, after brushing the snow that had already found its way inside off the bar counter, handed his surly, sharp-featured customer a newspaper. “They’re writing that the Metropolis is enduring a fierce cold. ‘The most frigid winter in thirty years!’ Just look at that. They’re experiencing a mere thirty degrees below zero and they’re already howling!”
“Mark,” the woman who, were it not for her scars, rough mannerisms, and baggy clothing, might’ve passed for pretty, flung her wrapped rifle onto the counter and snapped her fingers, pointing at a bottle of vodka. “Don’t forget that the capital sits on the ocean and a river. The humidity is different there.”
“I know, I know,” the bear of a man muttered and splashed some clear liquid into a cloudy glass—it was the kind of drink that sometimes warmed a person better than a campfire or a wood-burning stove. And when it came to the latter, in the only inn within thirty kilometers, all eight of them were currently puffing away. “It’s just that, out here, it’s already minus forty-five, and if you don’t wrap a scarf around your face, then…”
The innkeeper lifted the stiff leather patch covering his nose.
“Mark!”
“Fucking hell, you bastard, I’m eating!”
“By the Light! Mark, I’ll shoot your ears off!”
“You bitch, Mark!”
The innkeeper guffawed but hurried to replace his patch. There was no sense in disturbing the good Cloaks who’d been dispatched to the border of the Great Glacier to guard the construction of a new fort.
“Katerina, how long have we known each other?” The innkeeper asked.
The scarred woman grimaced and bent several fingers.
“Three months, Noseless,” replied the one called Katerina. “Which is exactly how long my backside has been freezing in this hole.”
“There! Three months,” the innkeeper nodded. “And in those three months, it hasn’t once been warmer than minus ten. And that was only at the very start of winter.”
“Well, nobody forced you to open an inn half a day’s journey from the Glacier,” Katerina shrugged, tipped the contents of the faceted glass down her throat, and noisily inhaled the scent of her own forearm. “Be grateful the air here is dry and not like in the capital.”
“They have heating there...” Mark said wistfully.
“And out here, our hearts keep you warm.”
“Cloaks don’t have hearts, Katerina,” the innkeeper waved her off. “You’re soulless, unprincipled swine who frighten away the majority of my clientele.”
“Your clientele is usually frightened away by your frostbitten nose, Mark,” Katerina observed, not the least bit offended.
She was about to say something else but was interrupted by the sharp-featured man who had been reading the offered newspaper all this time.
“Where’s Cassara?”
Katerina silently pointed her thumb over her shoulder and asked with a glance for another pour.
“Why?” She asked.
“No reason, Katerina,” the sharp-featured man rolled the newspaper into a tube and, after tossing several kso onto the counter, rose, strapped on his snowshoes, and headed for the exit. “I’m simply famous for my idle curiosity and my complete disdain for warmth. Just like the dead.”
With a creak of the door, the sharp-featured man vanished outside. Mark whispered:
“What’s gotten into him?”
Katerina sighed and tipped back her second glass.
“The Lieutenant can’t stand the cold,” was all she said before turning to the window.
There, beyond the nearly-frozen, arrow-slit-sized pane of glass set into meter-thick log walls, snow was falling. It was deceptively soft and slow. There was no wind, no blizzard, no storm. Only stillness and snow. And any inexperienced traveler deceived by the illusion of this snowy tranquility risked learning within a quarter of an hour why Mark the innkeeper had been nicknamed Noseless.
The sharp-featured man didn’t allow himself to be weak. However, even his inhuman blood and flesh had a breaking point, so he pulled a woolen cloth over his face and buttoned his fur coat up to his chin. Alas, the colder it grew, the sooner that breaking point arrived.
His accursed father—may the demons send him round and round in circles—hadn’t managed to ensure that his creations could function properly in any weather... He’d lacked the brains for it, probably.
The lieutenant stopped and looked up at the sky. It was so high, so vast and clean, and strewn with bright stars and galaxies.
And below that... For an instant, he thought he glimpsed a hunched figure wrapped in a dirty, partially-torn cloak. And all that remained visible were the two glowing, amber eyes burning beneath the figure’s “hood.” They somehow reminded the lieutenant of the lad whose path had diverged from his own more than a year ago.
He wondered how the boy was doing... Had the capital devoured that naive kid? Had he managed to keep his wits about him?
The lieutenant sighed and rubbed his eyes. The cold was playing tricks on him and making him see things that weren’t there. Cassara was now standing where the hunched old crone had been. She was the same as always, no more changeable than a sculpture carved into a cliff face.
The vampire was as graceful as a cat, more beautiful than fairy-tale creatures, and she had pale skin and hair whiter than snow. She was dressed in a light blouse with a wide décolletage that left her chest almost entirely exposed. It was barely covered by a cotton brassiere. Tightly fitted pants, belted with a bandolier of revolvers, were tucked into leather boots that reached nearly to the top of her thighs.
Cassara tilted her hat slightly—it had a brim so wide that its sides extended past her shoulders. Starlight plucked her delicate features from the darkness, which looked as though they belonged on a porcelain doll rather than a living creature. And she was definitely not a living creature... She had red eyes as clouded as a corpse’s, and a pair of long fangs peeking out slightly from beneath her upper lip.
The lieutenant sometimes envied the fact that his long-standing acquaintance experienced no difficulties whatsoever with the weather. On the contrary—with the onset of winter, Cassara became even more beautiful than usual... if that were even possible. But when he thought about it, her pale skin matched the snow-white mantle a little too well.
“What are you doing, bloodsucker?” The lieutenant asked as he came over to stand next to his subordinate.
“Listening,” she answered in a voice that simultaneously imitated the cawing of crows and... a song. Humans didn’t speak this way. Nor did the Firstborn.
“Listening to what?” The lieutenant asked, tracing the direction of the vampire’s gaze.
The beauty’s dead, fish-like eyes had turned toward the southeast. She seemed to be looking at the smoke-covered expanse of the fort that was under construction, and to which the railroad had already been extended. This was a new, or perhaps merely the latest, outpost on the border. Why the Empire needed to erect, and at an accelerated pace at that, a powerful stone fortification at the very edge of the Great Glacier, designed to garrison an entire infantry corps—that was something the lieutenant preferred not to think about.
“To Snow Wolf’s song,” the vampire answered.
The lieutenant frowned.
“Wolves? I don’t hear any wolves, Cassara.”
“Of course you don’t, Ivan. He’s too far away.”
“Ivan was the name of my damned father. You really should try to remember that my name is Yonatan.”
The vampire said nothing. And Yonatan had long since learned that when Cassara didn’t intend to speak about something, questioning her was an utterly pointless endeavor.
And so they stood there, side by side. They stood beneath the soft touches of the snowfall, in the shadow of the icy colossus towering behind them, gazing at the columns of smoke rising above the fort that was under construction.
“He is still weak and small,” the undead suddenly added. “But enough time will pass, Yonatan, and he will no longer need help to sing his song.”
Yonatan sighed and looked up at the sky once more. Over the years, he had come to understand something else as well: sometimes, what Cassara said was nonsense. This was, perhaps, to be expected from a creature whose memory held entire centuries of endless wandering.
“Did you want something?” The vampire abruptly changed the subject.
Yonatan produced the rolled-up newspaper from inside his coat.
“Orders from the Colonel, bloodsucker. We’re moving farther west. There’s a matter that needs checking out.”
“A pity,” was all Cassara said.
Despite the fact that she could feel neither cold nor heat, nor anything else, the vampire still harbored a particular attachment to winter.
Metropolis
Milar was still holding the hammer cocked. Not that it made a difference, but doing so was more of a habit than anything else.
“‘Linda Day…’” For some reason, the captain couldn’t shake the name from his mind.
Where had he heard that name before? Where...
Of course!
That was the name of one of the governesses at the Larand Monastery of the Sisters of Light! Ard had mentioned her in his report, and captain Pnev remembered her because... he’d been the one to write that report based on his partner’s tale! They’d lost two of Driba’s students, never managing to determine how many of the monastery’s staff had been involved in the conspiracy. The investigation had reached a dead end because all the civilian staff, owing to the monastery’s reconstruction, had either been transferred to other monasteries or had resigned.
As for the nuns—they’d passed all the necessary checks, and were no longer considered suspects.
All of this flashed through Milar’s mind in an instant. One of the orcs who’d been standing some distance away from Linda Day hadn’t even finished landing. He’d leapt inhumanly far, soaring a good two meters above the snow and covering no less than four, arching his back and raising a wide, serrated knife above his head. In a human’s hands, it could easily have passed for a broadsword.
Descending from the sky with nearly a quarter ton of fury and muscle, he could’ve crushed not only the tall but wiry young man, but Milar’s service automobile as well. For a moment, the captain marveled once more at the courage and valor of the knights and warriors of ancient Gales. Encased in armor and mounted on horseback, they had fought... this? Monsters capable of punching through their plate with a bare fist?
Thick, yellowish saliva was dripping from the orc’s tusks and fangs, and he’d already driven his knife straight at Ard’s chest. Milar very nearly squeezed the trigger, even though he wasn’t all that confident that he could avoid hitting his partner.
His help wasn’t needed.
Ard’s left hand shot skyward, and the orc, like an automobile that had slammed into a wall at full speed, simply stopped. Dark blood sprayed in all directions, and the crunch of his broken nose and shattered jaw sounded like the crash of that same wrecked automobile.
Ard seized the orc by the face like he was plucking a gnat out of the air. And the harder the wind blew, the more the blizzard howled, the more convinced Milar became that the young man’s figure was gradually growing larger.
Slowly, very slowly, the face covered in snow-white patterns—its eye sockets flooded with blue—turned toward the bleeding orc.
“Grazrakz’car arar rodahczr,” the snowy voice growled.
Milar didn’t know the orcish tongue, but judging by the way the two dozen orcs—some of them were standing below on the snow, and some were leaning out the windows of the utility buildings—screamed and started beating their chests… When they all raised their rifles in unison, he became certain that Ard hadn’t merely cursed at them, but delivered a truly grave insult.
At once, the barrage of bullets resumed with triple the force. And the orcs stationed in the buildings leaped from the windows. Linda Day, who was wreathed in a viscous black-and-crimson haze, retreated.
“What did he say?!” Milar screamed, barely peeking out from behind cover.
Captain Aloaeiol didn’t answer immediately.
“Your names will not be remembered,” she whispered.
At that moment, the runes on Ard’s staff blazed to life. These were the ones Milar had already seen once before, on the embankment, when his partner had been caught up in the fury of the Niewa. Except there was no river this time, no Tazidahian embassy, no rage coming from a primordial avatar of the elements. Only one mage, two dozen orcs, a snowstorm, and a hundred whistling bullets.
And not one of them reached its target. The ice-shackled lead froze in mid-air and, after colliding with the whirling blizzard, joined it as more of its jagged shards. If even metal was surrendering to the dominion of this enchanted winter, was there any chance at all for the orc writhing in its icy grip?
The answer came swiftly. The orc’s legs buckled, and he slipped from Ard’s fingers. Slowly, like a snowflake in a calm snowfall, he sank to his knees, and as he fell... icy forest flowers bloomed across his body. Their buds pierced his skin, tearing open the frozen edges of revolting, ragged wounds; their petals striped his flesh, and before the orc struck the crimson snow, three ice thorns shot out from his eyes and mouth. All that reached the ground was clothing dusted with red slivers of ice.
But the other orcs seemed blind to this gruesome spectacle. Their eyes, which were full of animal fury, never left Ard. And the young man, slowly measuring his steps with his staff, was walking across the inner yard toward Linda Day, who had opened her grimoire. The young man looked as though he were strolling through a meadow, not standing in the midst of battle.
Three orcs hurled aside their useless, ice-caked rifles and revolvers, bared their knives, and charged at Ard from three different directions. And he merely tapped his staff against the ground, almost imperceptibly.
The walls of the neighboring buildings exploded in sheets of ice. The earth heaved up into snowy ridges. The air crackled so violently that Milar choked and covered his mouth and nose with his forearm. He wasn’t certain that his lungs could withstand such cold. The orcs, not expecting an invisible attack, had not held their breaths.
Their bodies slid across the snow, carried by the momentum of their charge, their graying skin frosting over before his very eyes. With a crystalline chime, their glass-like eyes cracked, and when their corpses finally stopped sliding, Ard simply stepped over the shattered remnants of their bodies. It almost looked as though someone had smashed several porcelain figurines to pieces.
And before the remaining orcs could comprehend what was happening, the staff hit the snow once more, causing white ice-sparks to surge out. The blizzard erupted in another vortex, and Milar remembered his childhood, back when he had lived in a small town at the edge of the Tsar’s Forest. He still remembered how the wolves had howled on hungry, frozen nights. And, by the Eternal Angels, their songs hadn’t contained a tenth of the terror the captain could now discern in the impenetrable blizzard.
And when it settled, the captain’s eyes confirmed what his ears had told him. A pack of wolves, each of them blazing with the white haze of living snow, their maws glittering with crystalline fangs, charged ahead of the mage who had summoned them.
Leaving no tracks in the snow, they raced toward their prey. The orcs tried to slash them with their knives, strike them with their fists, claw at them—all in vain. The wounds on their snowy bodies sealed shut, absorbing the swirling snowstorm around them. The same could not be said of the wounds carved into living flesh.
The orcs screamed, groaned, rasped, choking on freezing blood. Icy fangs tore into them. The jaws of the enormous wolves—each was the size of a horse—were capable of ripping off whole slabs of meat, exposing bone and tearing out entrails. Just a few seconds passed before the pack rejoined their calmly-strolling master. Blood-soaked, blazing with white radiance, they bared their icy maws.
Milar didn’t know what Star Mages had faced during the Ectassus and Gales war, but... Eternal Angels! Ard wasn’t even an Aean’Hane! But then... then... What had Aror been?
Milar was jolted out of his musings by a reminder that the orcs weren’t the only ambushers here.
Linda Day struck her staff against the ground, and beneath her feet, a large seal the color of clotted blood blazed to life. Milar didn’t really understand Star Magic, but he grasped that this was unlikely to fall within the capabilities of a Green Star Mage.
The top of Day’s staff ignited with a flame that was the color of rotten meat, and she swung it sharply with both hands, like a painter leaving a sweeping brushstroke on canvas. Only instead of oil paint, a nauseating, roiling haze spread through the air. Arms came out of it. Dozens of long, unnaturally-twisted arms. They had multiple joints, pale gray skin, and instead of fingers, that same, putrid fire blazed at their tips.
Ard didn’t even slow down.
The snow wolves leaped in front of their leader. With their snow-white bodies, they shielded Ard from the rotten flame, vanishing in bursts of gray haze. They also pressed their paws down on the arms, pinning them to the ground so their brethren could sink their fangs into the joints and likewise vanish into the haze, taking the ghastly limbs with them. The more he looked at them, the more Milar became convinced that these arms had been spawned by a forbidden branch of Star Magic.
Linda Day was screaming something, but Milar couldn’t hear her through the ever-intensifying blizzard. His senses had been reduced to the sensation of cold and his eyes. The captain watched as Ard tapped his staff against the ground once more. Only this time, there was neither chiming nor another roaring blizzard exploding with fervent violence. Beneath the young man’s feet, a seal Milar had seen many times before came to life. Usually, after this, an ice spear would shoot out of his partner’s staff.
However, this time, things went somewhat differently. First, the accumulators on Ard’s fingers crumbled to fine dust, and then the same fate befell those glimmering on his belt. Eight Ertalain crystals, four for each of his Stars, dissolved in the twitching dance of what seemed to be a living blizzard.
The top of Ard’s staff ignited with white flame, or perhaps it was ice. The air around it seemed like it was so cold that it had imprisoned light within itself, refusing to let it escape. The ice spear did indeed begin spinning madly above the staff. But, with each revolution, it also drew the blizzard into itself. It lengthened and widened until it had become something like a sharpened ship’s mast. Its edges grazed the walls of buildings, literally shearing away the brick and turning the stone into snow dust.
Eternal Angels! You could’ve skewered an entire military truck on such a thing!
Ard swung his staff, and the ice mast flew forward. Spinning like a spindle, it dragged the blizzard along in its wake, and the blizzard, in turn, reduced the surrounding buildings and asphalt to something resembling stone tinsel. It was as though the surrounding area had been put through a meat grinder.
On Linda Day’s staff, one of the seals engraved into the metal flared to life. The ghastly arms vanished, leaving behind only a few wolves that were now gradually merging with the blizzard. Bloody bubbles were already flying out of the tip of Day’s staff. They swelled and merged into a single curtain of roiling, crimson foam. Whenever they touched a surface, a short pop followed, and perfectly smooth hemispheres were left behind. It didn’t look like the work of acid or invisible blades, but as though an invisible ice-cream scoop had simply taken chunks out of reality itself.
The sharpened ice mast—or maybe it was a spear that even a dockyard giant couldn’t have lifted—slammed into the roiling foam, and the pops merged into a single cacophony of sound. A chain of sticky pseudo-explosions started devouring the spear without slowing it down at all. It thinned, shrank, and seemed about to vanish into the depths of the roiling blood. However, with each new pop, each freshly-burst bubble, the foamy curtain shielding Linda Day grew thinner and thinner, until at last, the woman cried out.
A crystalline needle the size of a child’s hand passed through the barrier and buried itself in Day’s abdomen. And, judging by the way she choked, spitting out blood, the way she dropped her staff, and the way her legs buckled, all strength fleeing them at once… the needle had severed her spine.
The white patterns on Ard’s body had once again begun to fade. He flicked his hand and the blizzard carried Linda Day toward him. He seized her by the throat and hoisted her above the ground as though she weighed as much as a feather.
The eye sockets of both Ard and Linda Day were blazing with bright mist. Milar had heard every kind of scream before. Screams full of the kind of mortal terror that causes the body to abandon reason and plunge into the depths of animal fear in the face of death. He’d heard a scream that cannot be described if you’ve never heard it yourself, and if you have—you would never forget it.
Day didn’t scream like that.
Hers was somehow worse. She screamed as her eyes crusted over with skin-flaying ice. She screamed as gray skin blistered and burst. She screamed as slabs of frozen flesh sloughed away.
At some point, all that remained in Ard’s hand was a skull. It had been polished by the blizzard, its jaw shattered by its own screams.
The young man swayed and, dropping the skull, collapsed into the snow. In that same instant, the blizzard died out, and breathing in no longer caused the captain pain.
“Take the documents,” Aloaeiol rasped hoarsely, nodding toward the ice-covered papers and photographs scattered behind them. “And let’s go, before our own colleagues show up!”
Milar nodded and hurried, scraping his fingers on the sharp ice to gather the evidence. Everything that had happened had taken less than a minute, and the captain... The captain was glad that he’d been born in the modern era, and not five centuries ago.
The first chance he got, he would light a candle in the Church of the Holy Warriors to honor the simple Galessians who, for centuries, had fought against exactly what Milar had just witnessed.