False Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure) (38 page)

Much was embossed in the hard granite: names and dates, of course, ivy and leaves and growing things…And the symbols of the various gods to whom the fallen had been most closely devoted.

Whether it was the mystical link between them or a more mundane understanding, Ferrand nodded sharply. “Will it be enough?”

“Bet it'll slow him down, at least,” she said.

“Will
we
be enough?”

“The three of us will. Olgun?”

She swore she could sense the god taking a deep breath, bracing himself against—against whatever spiritual surface he might have had to brace himself. “On three,” she told Ferrand.

“One.”

The two of them laid their hands upon the headstone, one on each side, gripping as tight as the broad and relatively smooth surface would permit.

“Two!”

They burned with the surge of Olgun's power, infusing flesh, muscle, bone. Between the two of them, the heavy granite rocked easily within its shallow foundation of soil.

“
Three!
”

The tombstone wrenched free of the earth, dripping dirt and beetles and strands of root. Again, Olgun's power flared within them and they were running, faster even than they had before, when unencumbered by hundreds of pounds of stone.

Widdershins felt Ferrand's exhaustion as a lapping tide against her calves even as she struggled to repress her own. A quick glance his way, and she nearly dropped her side of the stone; his cheeks were pale and hollow, his brow glistening, as though he'd gone for nights with neither sleep nor food over the span of the last minute. She wondered if she looked half that badly off, if she'd even feel it if she were.

Iruoch saw them coming, of course. But just as he began to step back, Evrard and Renard redoubled their attack, pinning him into place for an extra few seconds…

With a twin scream not entirely dissimilar from the creature's own voice, Widdershins and the monk slammed the makeshift battering ram into the creature, leading with the holy symbol of Geurron along the topmost edge.

Bone and granite cracked in an ear-rending duet. The phantom children gasped and fell silent, even as Iruoch screamed. Widdershins pushed forward, onward, until her enemy collapsed, pinned to the earth beneath the weight and sanctity of the carven stone.

“Now! While he's down!” She struck as she cried out, thrusting with the tip of her blade, aiming for the face, the neck. Around her, the others did the same with sword and staff, struggling, hoping, praying that they could actually
kill
the damned thing before it had the opportunity to recover.

They failed.

Continuously shrieking, his face coated with the dried powder that might or might not have been his blood, Iruoch tensed, bringing his knees up and his elbows down. The tombstone cracked across the center and fell away in two distinct halves. One tumbled to the earth with a dull thump as the fae twisted to his feet. The other, lacking any of the symbols he found so agonizing, he clutched in a single inhuman hand.

“My turn…”

Ferrand reached out, trying to hook Iruoch's arm with the curved end of Sicard's staff—and Iruoch spun and drove the chunk of stone down, shattering the monk's knee into a mangled wad of torn flesh, ripped tendon, and splintered bone.

With so horrific an injury, even a normal man might well have succumbed to shock. Already under the strain of the bishop's spell, laboring to channel a divine strength that was never his, Ferrand's body simply surrendered.

He fell limp to the blood-soaked grass. And Widdershins felt her throat trying to rip itself open from within as she screamed.

Fire and ice warred for dominance in the nerves of her leg, making the entire left side of her body lock up in agony. Sparks burst inside her; her own thoughts stabbed at her; her memories singed the edges of her mind. Her vision—or what little she could make out through the blurring and twisting of the inner fire—constricted, a tunnel, then a pinprick in a field of black. Through it, all she could see, now, was Ferrand's slack face, and she knew without a doubt that the spell was dragging her down into death alongside him.

Except it didn't. She felt the grass under her cheek, little things crawling in the soil, the sun beating down on her neck. She heard the swish and clatter of blades, the grunts of exertion, the bishop's broken voice calling Brother Ferrand's name.

Her leg ached, but it was a dull, distant sort of pain, the last lingering remnants of an old injury. And where she'd felt that peculiar connection, that strange echo of Ferrand's memories lurking just behind a thin curtain of concentration, she now sensed only…

“Olgun?!”

Despite his lack of anything resembling a head, she sensed what could only be a nod.

“You cut the link?”

Another nod, along with an emotional gust suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that it hadn't been even remotely easy.

“Thank you.” She sucked in a deep breath. “How are we doing?”

Before the god could answer, she heard a grunt of pain and felt a few warm spatters of blood across her outstretched hands.

“Oh. That good?” Widdershins forced her eyes open and craned her neck to see.

The combatants drew ever nearer to Sicard and Julien, despite the best efforts of the aristocrat and the thief to hold the line. Renard was bleeding furiously from his left arm and shoulder, where Iruoch's touch had ripped strips of skin from his body. It hadn't slowed him much—not yet—but he winced in pain with every step. Evrard didn't seem much better off, favoring the same spot on his body, even though it bore no visible injury. Iruoch seemed to be playing with them as much as battling them, casually brushing their blades aside, sometimes feigning a lunge at one or the other without bothering to follow through.

Igraine Vernadoe stood between the two groups, shouting prayers and malisons, her icon of the Shrouded God raised high. It was brave, no doubt, but if it had any appreciable impact on Iruoch's advance, Widdershins couldn't see it from here. The glistening sweat on the priestess's forehead, which
was
visible to Widdershins, suggested that Igraine didn't expect much good to come of her defiance, either. Since neither she nor Julien still held their pistols, Widdershins assumed that they'd taken their shots during the brief moments when she was insensate on the lawn.

And speaking of Julien…

“—better idea?!” the Guardsman was shouting, shaking Sicard by the shoulders. Clearly, any courtesy or respect he'd normally have felt inclined to show the bishop was long gone.

Widdershins grunted, trying to rise without drawing Iruoch's attention, and strained to listen in on the argument. Her ears tingled as Olgun lent a hand to her efforts.

“Even if she
wasn't
too far away and too busy,” Sicard was insisting through clenched teeth, “it takes ten or fifteen minutes to cast! This'll be long over before—”

“You can
try
! I can't just stand here
useless
like this!”

The bishop shook his head, and it was only Olgun's power that enabled Widdershins to hear his muttered reply. “It didn't help Brother Ferrand much, did it?”

“Gods
damn
you, we have to do
something
! We—”

Widdershins felt the roiling tumult of Olgun's emotional shouting, strained to make sense of concepts too complex to be easily conveyed. “What? I don't…But…Are you sure? All
right
, you don't have to
yell
! Julien! Your Eminence!” She winced even as she raised her voice, knowing she'd just announced to Iruoch that she was up and around. “Just start casting!”

“But—,” Sicard began.

“Trust me!”

“Trust her,” Julien insisted. “Do it.”

The bishop jogged back to where he'd left the iron brazier and began scooping up the last of his stock of herbs and incense. Julien trailed behind, his rapier drawn, watching the ongoing melee.

“Awake, awake, our little girl's awake!” Iruoch actually clapped his hands with glee as he bent over backward and stepped to the left, allowing both Renard's and Evrard's blades to pass harmlessly through the space he'd just vacated. “Oh, I'm
so
happy!” He straightened with impossible speed, a living catapult snapping upright, with one arm outstretched. The creature's palm slapped against Renard's wounded shoulder, sending him tumbling—and screaming—across the grass, leaving a serpentine trail of blood behind him.

“If you're not awake,” Iruoch continued, his voice dropping in mock disappointment, “you don't actually
feel
anything.” The fingers of his left hand twitched and flexed, parrying even the fastest and most ornate of Evrard's thrusts. “And
that's
no fun at
all
!”

The children booed at the very idea.

“Yep, I'm awake!” Widdershins scooped her rapier up from where it had fallen, slashed the air before her a time or two. “Not feeling anything, though. Why don't you come get me?” Even before the creature took a step, she had begun to fall back, retreating with a slow but steady pace, trusting Olgun to warn her if she was about to back into an obstacle of any sort.

“Aww…Step and dance and run away, thiefie doesn't want to play?” Iruoch took a pace toward her, a second, and then, “Thiefie thinks I'm really, really stupid.”

Rotating so swiftly that it should have neatly snapped his knees, Iruoch bounded back toward the others. Evrard took a desperate swing, but again caught nothing but the hem of the filthy coat. The creature landed beside Igraine, flinched away from the holy symbol, and then kicked her in the gut with the toe of his boot. The priestess doubled over, tumbling to the earth and spitting blood-tinged vomit.

Their trick with the tombstone, and the mass of injuries they'd inflicted,
had
left some enduring effect. His leap was less steady, his pace not quite as swift as Widdershins remembered it. Even so, as she broke into another run, ignoring the growing pain in her sides and the exhausted patina that lay across every one of Olgun's emotions, she knew that she could never reach the creature before he reached Julien and Sicard.

The volume of the bishop's incantation grew louder, the tension in the major's shoulders more obvious, but neither of them could do anything but press on, and hope.

Because she'd told them to. Because they trusted her.

“Olgun! Olgun, it has to be now!” She was gasping, forcing each word out between harsh breaths and pounding steps. “It has to be
now
!”

The god's power lashed outward, a whip of sheer, stubborn
intent
. Widdershins had never felt anything quite like it, and stumbled as she ran. She felt her god reach out, snagging the raw strands of the mystical link that were only beginning to form around Julien, the earliest stages of Sicard's spell. She felt him grasping the remnants of the prior spell that clung to
her
, the broken link that had joined her with the late and lamented Brother Ferrand; felt him sculpting it beneath his intangible touch, forcing it into a new form.

And she felt the two ends, of the two distinct but similar incomplete magics, touch and fuse into one.

Sicard could not have done it. Olgun could not have done it. But together, they forced the magics to meld. In perhaps a tenth the time it should have required, Widdershins and Julien were joined.

Again she felt a brief moment of disorientation, of overlapping memories and shared experiences, but it was gone half a heartbeat after it began. Widdershins had experienced the effect once already, and knew better how to work through it—and because she knew it, so, too, did Julien.

Iruoch was two steps away from him when Julien rose, faster than a striking serpent, and plunged his sword through Iruoch's throat.

It wasn't enough to kill the creature, not by far, but Iruoch stumbled to a sudden halt, gagging and coughing up rusty powder. He staggered back, pulling himself off the blade, hands clutching briefly at the wound.

Again Julien struck, the tip of his sword moving too swiftly even for Iruoch, and two of those spidery fingers tumbled through the air in an almost graceful arc to land, flopping and twitching, in the dust.

Everyone—Iruoch included—fell silent and stared at the thrashing digits for a moment, until they swiftly decomposed with a puff of grayish, peppermint-scented powder. Several of the beetles boring through the nearby soil abruptly metamorphosed into bright scarlet moths. They fluttered away on the summer breeze, their flight paths awkward and very, very confused.

Slowly, gradually, Iruoch turned to gawp at Julien. “Those were two of my
favorites
!”

“Um…” Julien sounded utterly at a loss. “I'm sorry?”

Iruoch lunged; the Guardsman parried. Back and forth, step and cross-step…And then, before the creature could even begin to wear his opponent down, Widdershins was there.

Finally,
finally
, it looked as though they might have a chance. The two of them shared not only in Olgun's gifts, as Widdershins and Ferrand had done, but in Julien's skill and experience in the Guard. Not only her speed, but his training, allowed them to block strokes that might otherwise have laid open their flesh; to stab through the tiniest openings in Iruoch's own defenses. Blood, both dusty and liquid, flew—but for the first time, there was far more of the former than the latter.