Chapter 51- The Cultists(2)

Chapter 51: 51- The Cultists(2)

"Sister Mara tells me you have walked a long way through the gray without opening your veins to the sky," Julian said gently, taking a single slow step down the gravel slope.

"She says she cannot smell a single flower of lunar grace blooming in your lungs.

Tell me, children... why do you wrap yourselves in dead animal skins and hoard your warmth like thieves? Don’t you hear Her crying up there in the clouds?"

"We hear you talking too much," Valera said coldly. "Take another step down this slope and I’ll freeze your tongue to the roof of your mouth, priest."

Behind Julian, the three blood-smeared High-Stage acolytes hissed like snakes, their bodies visibly trembling as they stared at Valera’s neck above her coat collar.

"Listen to how proud she is, Father!" the blind acolyte, Mara, whimpered, licking the dried purple blood off her upper lip as her fingers twitched at her sides.

"She thinks her blood belongs to her! Let us wash the mirror with her, Father, just a quart from her arm the Mother hasn’t tasted clean blood since the winter solstice!"

"Patience, Sister," Father Julian murmured, though in Sol’s thermal sight, the Peak-Stage core inside the priest’s chest was already swelling, pushing cold purple mist down into his bare, crystal-studded forearms.

"We are shepherds, not wolves. We do not take the whole sheep unless it kicks against the goad."

Julian held out his left hand toward Sol, palm up, and pointed with his right at the curved silver knife hanging from his neck.

"The toll for using the Mother’s road is very small, my son," Julian said, his voice dropping its soft warmth and taking on a heavy, hypnotic cadence that made the twenty-seven barefoot pullers behind him sway in unison.

"Come up to the wagon. Kneel on the silver glass. Let me open one small vein in your wrist, just a cup of that hot, selfish blood you are hiding under your coat so we may offer it to the Eye and plant a single seed of lunar crystal under your skin. Once you carry Her mark, you may walk wherever you wish."

Sol looked through his linen blindfold at the glowing purple shards embedded in the priest’s arms, every single one of them leaking slow, rotting beast-madness straight into the man’s bloodstream and then up at the wagon where Thomas’s frozen blood was still sitting in the silver buckets.

"If I let you put one of those under my skin," Sol said quietly, "it’d turn to gray dust before you finished tying the bandage. And my blood’s staying inside my shirt today. Move your people."

Father Julian’s warm smile vanished.

"You were given eyes to see the Moon, and you cover them with dirty rags," the priest whispered, his fingers closing around the handle of the silver skinning-knife at his throat.

"You were given blood to feed the sky, and you keep it locked in the dark. Take their coats off, my children. Hold them down on the glass so the Mother can look at them!"

The thirty cultists didn’t draw formations or level spears like soldiers.

They shrieked, a high, joyful, animal sound and threw themselves down the gravel slope in a single, crashing wave of bodies.

Two of the mutated Low-Stage pullers, a man with an elongated, frost-blackened jaw and a woman carrying a heavy iron wagon-pin reached the bottom of the slope first, lunging with bare, claw-like hands straight for Valera’s coat collar to drag her up toward the mirror-cart.

Valera didn’t back up an inch.

As the woman swung the iron wagon-pin at her temple, Valera caught the woman’s bare wrist in her left Night-iron gauntlet, crushed the radius bone with a single squeeze of her Peak-Stage grip, and drove her right ice-spiked fist straight into the center of the woman’s chest.

CRACK.

A three-inch cone of Pure Moon frost punched straight through the fanatic’s sternum, freezing her heart solid between two beats.

To Valera’s horror, the second puller, the man with the mutated jaw didn’t even try to dodge her follow-through.

As Valera swung her backhand across his ribs, ripping open his white robe and freezing the meat of his side, the man laughed through a mouthful of blood and tried to lock his frostbitten arms around her waist to use his own dying weight as an anchor.

"They don’t care if you hit them!" Valera shouted, kicking the dying man in the knee to break his leg so she could pull free. "They’re trying to grab our hands!"

On her right, Sol met the three High-Stage acolytes head-on.

Sister Mara, the blind woman with the sewn eyelids came in low and fast, her fingers tipped with sharpened bone-splinters as she aimed straight for Sol’s throat while the other two acolytes swung heavy iron chains detached from the wagon traces to wrap around his legs.

Sol didn’t try to dance around the chains.

He planted his boots in the snow, let the first iron chain wrap around his left shin, barely feeling the impact against his dense shinbone and swung the six-pound carbon-steel hatchet in a short, brutal downward chop at the chain-holder’s forearm.

He didn’t hold back his core to stay hidden anymore.

As the hatchet came down, Sol flooded the bearded five-inch blade with a roaring surge of Peak-Stage solar fire, turning the iron head a blinding, screaming orange-white that lit up the gloomy shadow under the highway bridge like a flare.

SHING-HISS!

The white-hot blade sheared cleanly through the second acolyte’s wrist and buried itself four inches deep into the man’s collarbone, instantly boiling the purple blood in his arteries into a cloud of white steam and black soot.

As the acolyte dropped to his knees, dying from the thermal shock through his chest, the Silver Eye high above the overpass immediately reached down to claim its sacrifice.

The acolyte’s shoulder and neck began to break apart into rising, luminous threads of sacred silver mist.

And that was when the leftover solar fire clinging to Sol’s hatchet head touched the rising silver mist.

FWOOSH.

Instead of floating up into the gray sky toward the Moon like Brother Thomas had two minutes ago, the silver mist rising from the dead acolyte’s chest caught fire.

Before thirty pairs of fanatical eyes, the sacred silver essence of their brother violently ignited into a ball of angry orange flame, burned for half a second with a sound like dry grease hitting a skillet, and dropped straight down into the snow as a pile of dead, black remainings.