They left Gorm's forge at dawn.
Signy passed between them now, little hand occasionally seizing Aldric by the fingers which are wrapped in chains, sometimes by the robe of Artemis. She did not talk a lot, or even much at all, but she did not have to. Something had altered because of her presence. The silence which existed between the three of them was not the same as before. Less empty.
Aldric noticed. Didn't comment. Kept walking north.
Mountains arose all about them, sharp and white topped, old time rock which had witnessed empires come and go. The air got thinner. Colder. The type of cold that got into bones and kept.
Artemis was scanning her grimoire every minute now, looking to see if it was divine. Something is on the verge of happening. I can feel it as though some kind of pressure behind my eyes.
Aldric nodded. He felt it too. The relics in his body were fainting, agitated, thirsty.
Signy tugged his sleeve. Directed at a shadow in between two rocks.
He looked. Nothing there. But the way she stared...
"Signy?" Artemis knelt beside her. "What do you see?"
The girl shook her head. Didn't know how to explain. Had simply continued to stare at that shadow as though it were staring back.
Aldric's chains rose.
Too late.
The shadow at the feet of his feet broke open.
The eyes were purple in the dark, not making light, but producing it, two violet suns in a dark empty space. The voice of a woman was low and silken, and rolled about him like smoke.
"Come closer, little knight. Goodnight kisses, dark, to thee.
Aldric moved.
Chains were flung downwards, through his own shadow, into the place where the eyes were. They met nothing. The shadow reconstituted, and now was behind him and the eyes were laughing.
"So fast. So angry."
A wall of violet light went round Signy and repelled the darkness. And yet the darkness was not retiring, it only grew, and rose against the barrier as though it were a live creature.
One of the figures came out of the shadow of Aldric.
Tall. Impossible. A woman of liquid night, her flesh was semi transparent obsidian, which gave hints of a perfect shape beneath it. And long hair that smoked off at the ends. Eyes, purple, pupil less, simply infinite gulch. Two long curved blades were suspended on her hips, and they dripped with darkness, which smouldered where the ground was.
She smiled.
"Nythera." Artemis's voice was tight. "Goddess of Shadows. Heaven's executioner."
Nythera's smile widened. "The mage knows my name. How flattering." She moved, but not so much as a flow, splitting the darkness as he water does. I have looked at you, little knight. Killed your kind before. The furious ones, the shattered ones, the ones which believed they could struggle with heaven with nothing but agony. She tilted her head. "They all died screaming."
The chains that Aldric threw round him gave him a defensive ring. His eyes never left her.
"You're different, though." Nythera wound round him, leisurely and predatory. The curse, the little jest of Vharos, it preserves you. Makes you interesting." She licked her lips. I wonder what you are going to sound like when the screaming never ends.
She vanished.
The chains of Aldric struck where she had been empty air. He spun. Nothing. The barricade of Artemis was flashing, as if something was trying to test its position, and then recoiled.
"Behind you."
He turned. In she was, moving blades already. he secured the one on his chains, and repulsed the other with the forearm. Steel flaked the meat not deep, but sufficiently. Blood ran.
She was gone again.
"Too slow."
This time both sides got their blades at the same time. He guarded to left, right, got one through and made a gash in his ribs. Not deep. Just enough to hurt. Enough to make him remember that she can kill him whenever she pleases.
She wanted to play first.
Aldric's jaw tightened. He'd been played with before. Love thwarts, by deities who believed in pain as entertainment. Vharos, who had witnessed him kill his own family and referred to it as a test.
He no longer attempted to prophesy about her.
Closed his eyes.
Listened.
"Giving up already?" Her voice wound round him everywhere and nowhere. "I expected more fight. The murderer of the Grave Titan and you can not even
He moved.
The chains burst in all directions, and did not aim at her, but merely at filling up the room. One of them reached something the slightest opposition, as through smoke. He yanked. The chain returned unladen, but now there was dark on it, and it was clinging and writhing.
She'd touched it. Touched him.
"Clever." Less playful now. Sharper. "But clever isn't enough."
The attack changed.
No more hit and run. She was upon him even now like the storm cloud cutting him on all sides, a gloom covering his legs, voices in his ears. His wife's voice. His son's. Shouting his name, pleading to get him to quit, why he had done it.
He knew it wasn't real. Didn't matter. The tones hacked into him anyhow.
Artemis saw him falter. Felt his bonds loosen, his guards fall. The smile on Saw Nythera was widening as she came in to kill.
She glanced at Signy, cowering in the barrier, with open eyes.
Next she peeped at her grimoire.
You know, I will do something silly, said the girl to her. "Stay here."
Signy grabbed her sleeve. Shook her head.
Artemis mildly disengaged herself. "I have to. He'll die if I don't."
She came out of the barrier.
Nythera saw her coming. Dismissed her. A moment of darkness put out a tendril at the mage carelessly, scarcely at all.
Artemis's grimoire blazed.
Free pages torn, whirling round her like a tornado of violet light. The tendril struck them and broke, and became nothing. The eyes of Nythera were dilated a little, a little, a little.
Artemis kept walking.
"Goddess of Shadows." There was calmness and coldness in her voice that was completely steady. "Tied to darkness. Born from it. Limited by it."
She raised her hands.
Let me demonstrate to you what light is like.
The grimoire exploded.
Violet light shot in at the opening not soft, not slow, but at once, as a Sun rising. Shadows fled. Darkness burned. And Nythera, who was in a teleport, screamed.
She reappeared now twenty feet distant, one arm smouldering, half her face still in shadow, but the rest visible pale skin, hard features, eyes that were wide with amazed pain.
She looked frightened on the first occasion.
The chains of Aldric shifted before she could get back on her feet.
They wrapped her round her waist, her arms, her throat. She attempted to melt away, yet the light was still so bright, so close. There was a flicker of her shadow form which was unsteady. The chains held.
Aldric pulled her close.
She looked up at him, afraid and rebellious. You believe this makes any difference? The pantheon will send worse. And worse. Until you break."
Aldric looked at her. At the goddess that had come to shatter him. At the darkness to which his late wife had addressed him.
"Let them."
He tore out her relic.
It was free as roots pulling out of the ground.
The Veil of Shadow a fragment of pure black, throbbing with stolen night, in the form of a curved blade, and velvety soft in his hands. Nythera shrieked and abandoned her, which was too long and too abruptly. She faded away not into shadow but in nothingness and he was left with the relic in his hand.
And the pain.
Always the pain.
The relic drew into him, into his palm, into his wrist, into his arm, into his soul. Blackness spurred through his veins like ink in water, and black lines crept up his neck, and across his jaw, and into his eyes. New information overwhelmed his head: shadow teleportation, the ability to move stealthily, the possibility of becoming part of darkness.
New cracks split his skin.
He fell to his knees.
Artemis was present, and picking him up by the shoulders, screaming something he could not make out. The agony was too loud, a soundless scream, that pervaded his whole life. His veins were dark and wrious, and struggled with the other relics, and attempted to possess them.
His eyes became gray at the periphery.
Then little hands stroked on his face.
Signy.
She got on her knees before him and her lavender eyes were focused on his and her palms, which she had ashes on, were touching his cheeks. The black of his veins itself recoiled. Just slightly. Just enough.
The fractures ceased to extend.
The agony had been pushed to the level of intolerability.
Signy whispered: "Stay."
Aldric looked at her. At the child who was nothing, who was everything gone, who had just held back somewhere with a dying curse of a goddess with nothing but his hand.
He breathed.
The gloom fell into his bones, took its niche among the other relics, settled down.
Artemis was gazing wide eyed at Signy, but her grimoire was still in her hand.
"You... you healed him. The curse you pushed it back." She shook her head slowly. "That's not possible. That's not possible."
Signy looked at her hands. They slowly glowed, hung on the ash that was still clinging to them, then died.
I do not know what I did I do not know, I said to myself. "I just... I didn't want him to go."
Artemis opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Aldric. She was not burnt because she was in the path of the gods who incinerated her village. They burnt it because they were aware. They knew what she could do." She was seeing the girl with fresh eyes fear, wonder, something. "She's not just marked. She's the answer. The thing that can countercancelling what they have done.
Aldric looked at Signy.
Small, pale and trembling, she was looking back, wrapped in a mantle that was thirty sizes bigger.
Should not always be monsters, she thought, monsters.
He did not know what to answer that. So all he did was to draw her to himself, and huddle her very softly, and lean his back against his chest.
His veins were bluing and hummed restlessly in the darkness.
Straight back on the ridge above the valley Sir Gunnar brought out his spyglass.
He'd seen everything. The fight. The relic absorption. The fingers of the girl pushing the curse away.
His golden eyes narrowed.
"The Ash Child." He uttered them a few words, trying them. The ancient books... they believed it to be figurative. Symbolism. A story to frighten children."
He saw the three figures way down below, the knight, the mage, and the girl, coming northward again, diminishing in size.
"She shouldn't exist."
Gunnar turned. A light portal behind him opened and the golden halls of heaven could be seen.
He turned his back and walked away.
The King needed to know.