Chapter 201: War against Draca

Azriel

The sky lightened, and I felt Seraphel begin to shake against me.

I knew at once that it was not the sun. Dawn arrives slowly, and it arrives from one direction, and it warms the stone before it ever reaches the eye. This came all at once and from everywhere, a pale sick glow spreading across the whole horizon as though someone had held a lamp behind a sheet of thin cloth.

There was no gold anywhere in it.

Seraphel was still standing against my chest where I had pulled him a moment earlier.

The trembling was not the kind that comes from cold. I have held him through the cold. This began somewhere beneath his ribs and worked outward until his fingers shook where they had curled into the front of my robes, and he did not make a single sound while it happened.

He simply stood there and shook, and I understood that something was wrong with him beyond the obvious wrongness of what hung above us.

He had been carrying something since the council hall. I had asked him twice. The second time he had looked me in the face and told me to ask him again after we had won, and I had let him keep it, because he had been half dead on his feet and I had never once managed to push him when he looked at me in that way.

Now the sky had turned the color of a drowned thing, and there was no time left to ask a third time.

"Seraphel."

He did not answer.

"Look at me."

He lifted his head. His eyes were enormous and far too bright, and he was already trying to arrange his face into something that would reassure me, which was worse than if he had simply wept.

The horns had begun along the lower wall, three long notes and then three more.

Somewhere down the corridor Luceriel was giving orders in that clipped voice he uses when he is frightened and refuses to let anyone see it.

So I took his face in both hands and leaned down and kissed his forehead.

"Make sure you are all right," I said against his skin. "That is the only thing I am asking of you. Whatever happens out there, you come back to me breathing."

"I will be all right," he said.

It was not what I had asked him to say.

He had turned it slightly, the way he always does, and I heard the turn and let it stand, because Rona had appeared at the end of the corridor and the time for anything else was gone.

I let go of him.

Walking away was the hardest thing I have done in hundreds of years, and I have done a number of hard things.

I went down the terrace steps to where Anomas waited with his blade already loose in its sheath, exactly as we had planned, and I did not look back, because if I had looked back I would have gone back.

Behind me, three layers of warding closed over Seraphel with a sound like glass being set down carefully on stone.

Then the pressure came.

The air stopped being air and became something thicker, pressing inward against the ears until every sound seemed to be happening at the bottom of a well.

The torches along the terrace guttered down to thin blue threads. The birds in the olive trees below us stopped arguing all at once, mid-sound, which is a far worse noise than screaming.

The sky opened and just like Seraphel had said, the seven came through it, and behind them came the serpent, and out of its coils stepped my uncle wearing my dead concubine’s face.

He had not improved it. Kaevian had been beautiful in life, and Draca had taken that beauty and made it hang wrong, the way a fine coat hangs wrong on a man it was never cut for.

When he smiled, which he did at once and at length, it pulled too far on the left side.

"Nephew," he said.

His voice carried across the whole of the terraces without any effort. That is a demon trick, and a cheap one.

"You have your mother’s chin. Did anyone ever tell you? Lyrielle had exactly that chin, and she used to lift it at me in precisely the way you are lifting it now." He spread Kaevian’s hands wide. "And here you stand. The son of my sister, on a terrace in Verolona, shoulder to shoulder with the whelps of Elysium. Your mother’s own blood arranged in a tidy little row beside the people who put her in the ground. Tell me honestly. Does the irony keep you awake at night, or have you simply stopped noticing it?"

"You are speaking a great deal," I said, "for a man wearing a corpse that is coming apart at the seams."

The smile flattened by a hair. Only for an instant, but I saw it, and I put it away carefully, because Seraphel had told us in the war room that his vanity was a seam of its own.

"You were far more charming as a baby"

"No one stays young forever."

He laughed at that, with his head thrown back and Kaevian’s throat working around the sound, and while he laughed, he began to gather something powerful around him.

I felt it before I saw it. The pressure came up through the flagstones into the bones of the feet, and the air around him turned the color of a bruise being pressed. The seven lords spread behind him in a wide arc and opened their hands, and the thing he was building put roots down into all of them at once.

The last time, that same strike had come down on the mouth of the cavern and taken two hundred of Luceriel’s guard with it inside a single breath, because there had been nothing standing behind the outer barrier and every one of us had been beneath it when it fell.

This time, Raizel and Thamiel had held the upper terrace since the third hour of the night, and Pazuzu had been feeding the structure from the north tower since long before the sky went pale.

The barrier had been raised, set, and tested twice while Draca was still crossing the valley.

It broke across us like a wave breaking on a harbor wall.

There was an enormous soft sound, and light ran out along the underside of the barrier in long branching veins.

The terrace shook. Dust came down off the retaining wall in sheets, and a section of balustrade forty paces to my left went over the edge and fell a long way before it landed.

Somebody screamed further along the line, not from injury, but from the plain animal shock of standing beneath that much force and finding themselves alive at the end of it.

And then it was over, and every one of us was still standing.

I turned my head and found Seraphel at once, behind his three wards, on his feet, unharmed, both hands pressed flat against the inside of the innermost layer. He had come forward when it struck. Of course he had. He had moved toward it rather than away from it, which is the entire difficulty with him rendered in a single motion.

Draca stood in the settling dust and looked up at a barrier he had not expected to find there.

"Now," Luceriel said quietly from the upper terrace. "Exactly as we said. Now, we win this war."