Full-Blood Half-Breed (37 page)

Pock-Face grabbed his pitchfork and rose. He and his three Vile companions surrounded Paladin. Paladin stood with his legs apart in perfect balance, his fingers resting on Storm’s hilt.

“Do not dare judge me, híbrido!” Pock-Face barked.

“He does not wear the white,” one of the Vile rustics snarled, nodding at Paladin and his dark clothing.

They circled, screwing up their courage now that they faced an opponent more threatening than an unarmed woman and her children.

“They were like you, híbrido,” Pock-Face said. “Wicked. They would not accept the holy truth preached by the Prophet. They were judged and condemned.”

Paladin growled through clenched teeth,
“ ‘Judged and condemned’?”

“Sí!” Pock-Face shouted. “Judged and condemned!”

Paladin locked gazes with Pock-Face, his eyes promising death. “Now it’s your turn.”

It was over in less than a handful of seconds. Pock-Face and the rustics were untrained, slow, and clumsy. Paladin felt guilty over the ease with which he had ended them until he gazed upon the dead woman and her children. Pock-Face had called her Jacinta.

He signed Schöpfer’s Steinkreis symbol before his heart, a quartered circle. She was not just the goddess of justice. War, murder, and bloodshed were also Her domain. Invoking Her
blessings now seemed appropriate. “I am sorry I could not save you and your niños, Señora Jacinta, but let Schöpfer, and all the gods, see that I have avenged your murders.”

Even as he said it, he realized what a useless conceit vengeance was. It would not put life into the slain infant’s body. Avenged or not, they were all dead now. Vengeance, he reckoned, was a salve for the wounded souls of the living. It meant nothing to the dead. He thought of Lalo again. Did Lalo’s soul find any satisfaction that Paladin had avenged him? He doubted it. Yet Paladin would have done nothing different. Vengeance was a paltry recompense for the loss of a loved one, but what else was there?

He had once heard Urbano speak of revenge as a sweet thing. That was a lie, and a contemptible one. It was bitter. It was poison. And he despised it.

Paladin could not remember how to fight.

He couldn’t remember a lot of things, it seemed, like digging the hole in the sandy floor of the arena, or how he had come to be on the game field in the first place. He cowered in the makeshift foxhole, turtle-like, under an old wooden round-shield while one of Creador’s Bastards hacked at it. Every bone-jarring blow sprayed chips of fuming embers into the air and triggered cheers from the fifty thousand white-clad Viles watching from the arena stands. Just one of the bane’s punishing swings would have blasted a normal shield to splinters, yet the simple wooden disc absorbed the blazing, sustained brutality. It was bizarre that Paladin couldn’t remember where he had acquired the remarkable item. Perhaps it was manced.

“Get up,” Rebelde called from somewhere in the arena. “Get up, now!”

Paladin peeked out from under the shield and spied his family in the stands. They too wore the white cloaks of Vile faithful. His father shook his fist at him and bellowed, “Get up, Paladin! Get up!”

Rebelde ripped off his Vile vestment and leapt into the ether, his white cloak fluttering away on the wind. His body darkened and twisted unnaturally in metamorphosis. His torso stretched out snakelike and grew a covering of black scales. The serpentine creature’s head elongated and sprouted horns similar to those of a deer. It hovered above Creador’s Bastard Son, generating crackling thunderbolts in each of its two hawklike claws.

The bane swung its hoz at the dark dragón, but the dragón was faster. It hurled both silver bolts at once, blasting Creador’s Bastard Son into nothingness. The dragón floated in the air in front of Paladin, staring at him. More thunderbolts ignited in its claws, and except for the crackle of their voltaic energy, the entire arena was silent.

Paladin stared up into his father’s dark eyes housed within the reptilian head of the black dragón. “Am I asleep?”

“Get up.”

Paladin forced his eyes open and it hurt. The Grandfather threw spears of harsh morning at him. The world stank of brimstone and smoke and heaping mounds of death. He cringed, moaned, and coughed. The streets buzzed with the chatter of people at work and on the move, dousing the remains of fires, cleaning up debris and corpses. Leaving.

His entire body was an unfortumante collision of cuts and bruises and aches collected from Torneo. He focused past them, allowing the events of last night to drift back into his memory. He had tried to leave Santuario del Guerrero, but the West Gate had been closed and too well guarded to sneak out. The night had grown unseasonably cold. He had taken a thick woolen cloak from the body of a dead Vile and crawled into a ditch to wait and watch until the road was open once more. He probably hadn’t waited long before sleep took him. He had been exhausted and still was. It would have been easy to lie back in the ditch and fall asleep for a few more days. But Rebelde’s dark dragón pneuma flung wide the doors to his mind and entered.

“Get up, Paladin.” The Sending was so faint Paladin barely sensed it. “Flee to Pared de Hierro. Warn them. Viles spreading war. Viles—” The Sending flickered weakly and began to gutter like a candle flame caught in a draft. “We are trapped. Cannot get out. Will seek you at Pared de—”

Paladin focused hard on maintaining the contact with his father, but it was no use. Rebelde was too hurt, too weak, or too far away to sustain the spiritual link.

Paladin had no way to locate his family. The last thing he wanted to do was abandon them, but he could think of no alternative. If he stayed in Santuario del Guerrero, he was as good as dead. He would just have to trust in the resourcefulness of his family to escape. Rebelde and Jambiax were two of the greatest mancers alive. Walküre was an archer without peer. She and Rebelde both were blade masters. They were all smart and capable. If anyone could survive the banes and escape the city, they could. Hopefully, they would soon meet him on the road to Pared de Hierro.

He crawled out of the ditch and brushed himself off as he watched people leave the city. Throngs of folk, most clad in Vile white cloaks and mantles, poured through the West Gate under the watchful eyes of two banes and a cadre of Vile guards. There was such normality to the exodus, it was hard to appreciate that these people had just participated in the slaughter of hundreds—maybe even thousands—of innocent folk.

Paladin covered himself in the white cloak. It was cold enough that he could don the hood without being conspicuous. He joined the procession of evacuees marching out the West Gate, though he had to choke back a sob of misery when he took in the totality of last night’s destruction. Half the city’s towering tenements, viviendas, pyramids, and pagodas that had scraped the underbelly of the sky were gone, reduced to smoldering rubble. He ached for the loss
of grandeur.

“Give your soul to the Prophet!” one of the guards called as he approached the gates.

The two bane sentries watched from the top of the wall and the folk all responded, “My soul belongs to the Prophet.”

Paladin just nodded. Bad enough he had to wear their stinking cloak, he would be damned if he would repeat their foul oath. No one seemed to notice. He passed through the gates without incident, but just being near the banes was terrifying. He barely managed to stop himself from trembling beneath their crimson-visored glare. One of them could have easily been the bane that had chased him beneath the arena. Their clothing was nearly identical, and besides height, there was no way to distinguish one from the other.

Once he was out on the road, he avoided the other travelers for fear he might be recognized or forced into a conversation where his lack of religious zeal would betray him. But there were too many travelers on West Gate Road for him to be able to avoid them completely.

“
Buenos dias
, chico,” a woman called to him when they were about seven miles outside of the city.

“Sí,” Paladin answered. “Good morning, señora.”

She signed the Santosian holy symbol before her heart. “My soul belongs to the Prophet.”

“Sí,” Paladin said, keeping the scorn from his voice. “Sí, sí. The Prophet.”

Suspicion flashed in the woman’s dark green eyes. She was Oestean, about Walküre’s age, broad and tall, probably from Abundante, or maybe Malaroca. Folk grew pretty big and muscular in those country villages. The woman twisted her body to get a better look at him. She moved quickly, with the confidence of a trained fighter. But he kept his face hidden beneath his hood as best he could without it being obvious he was trying to hide.

She flashed him a friendly but insincere smile. “I am eager to get back to Nueva Aldea. There are many good folk there who will embrace el Espectro Bendecido and the holy words of the Prophet. Where are you headed, chico?”

“Pared de Hierro,” he said, exasperated. “But I have had a hard night, señora. Please, just let me—”

“Hold, chico.” She grabbed his shoulder in an iron grip and turned him to face her, her eyes wide with angry recognition. “I knew it! You are the híbrido from Torneo. The blasphemer who—”

She never finished her sentence. She damn sure never saw his fist fly into her face, shattering her jaw, knocking her cold. His hood flipped back, revealing his face. The people around them stopped. They stared and pointed with accusing eyes and fingers.

“The híbrido!” someone shouted. “Half-breed!”

“The Torneo cheat!” cried another.

Shouts of “Profaner!” “Blasphemer!” and “Infidel!” sounded all around him as the Viles—twenty or thirty in total—converged slowly, warily.

“Death to evil!” cried a soldier from Dulce Aire, drawing the sword at his hip.

“Death to evil!” other Viles chanted, forming into a mob. They stalked closer, some brandishing fine Malarocan steel, some shaking rusty old hand axes, all driven by righteous zeal.

An old man stabbed at him with a short sword, and Paladin slammed a fist into his wrinkled face. A beefy
primo del duende
man came at him with fists, and Paladin stomped the man’s kneecap, breaking it. “Please!” he begged. “I don’t want to fight!
Por favor!
Let me be on my way!”

“Death to evil!” the Viles screamed, and fell upon him, a single monstrous entity with scores of screaming heads and hundreds of thrashing limbs, all committed to his destruction.

He sidestepped a thrust from a spear even as he wrapped his fist around the hilt of the weapon sheathed at his side. “
Por favor
…” He drew. Lightning exploded from his fist. “…  don’t make me kill you.”

The Viles moved as one, backing away, first startled and then awed. Paladin turned in circles, menacing them with Storm. “No one need die here today …”

“Death to evil!” someone in the mob shouted. Others took up the cry and they all came at him, a flood of raving maniacs, swinging steel or throwing stones.

Paladin fell into his dance, blocking and parrying. He blasted the weapons from the hands of his attackers, splintering their wooden cudgels and steel blades.

Still they came.

He danced harder, but maintained his precision strikes, noting that Storm’s voltaic properties reacted in accordance with his will and mood, throwing small bolts of precise lightning that repelled attackers without obliterating them. Time and again he wounded his attackers when the easier—and smarter—strategy would have been to kill them.

He blasted weapons from gripping hands, yet still they came. He sliced off fingers, the severed digits spinning kaleidoscopes of crimson as they wheeled through the ether, but still they came. He hacked off their fingerless palms at the wrist, but still they came, bludgeoning him with spewing stumps. He hacked off arms at the elbow, at the shoulder …

And still they came.

A wave of limbless maniacs, howling and biting and head-butting, crashed into him. A crimson veil of cold fury descended over his vision. Like a fever, the Battle Frenzy took him, filled him, leaving no room in his mind, heart, or soul for mercy.

Paladin destroyed them.

Snarling heads, severed limbs, and chunks of humans gusted through the ether in a crimson maelstrom of gore.

And still they came.

More Viles appeared in the road, hurling into the clash, heedless of the sludgy, stinking carnage they trod through, determined to destroy the infidel or join their holy brethren as meat at his feet.

“Death to evil!” they shouted. “Give your soul to the Prophet!”

Gods be good. They will never stop coming
, Paladin realized.
Not until they’ve killed me or I’ve killed every man, woman, and child clad in white
.

Paladin was sick of killing.

So he ran.

Winter squatted patiently on the eastern horizon just a few hundred miles beyond the arena walls, painting the late morning sky in grim shades of indigo and slate. Those somber colors were at odds with the vivid joy Fox felt over the day’s ceremony. Pía led a choir of clerics and Talentosa in a song of praise to The One God, her dulcet voice so enchanting he would have believed it to be magic had he not known better. Tens of thousands of faithful were packed into the Phoenix-Rising Amphitheater, and each swayed languidly to the flow of her hymn as if half asleep and dreaming. When she ended the song, Fox—and everyone else—startled to full alertness.