Page 50 of While the Dark Remains
I hack and slash with my knife, managing to kill or wound most of the creatures that come at me. Saga more than holds her own, even with her broken foot. She slays monsters one by one; they pile up at her feet. But it isn’t enough. There are simply too many of them.
Claws rake through my shoulders and my belly; the pain is cold and wrong—these shadows drip with poison.
I curse as I fight and Saga prays, her voice at odds with the shrieking, hissing creatures. There are other monsters besides the winged ones: wolfish beings with snakelike scales and tails that sting, feathered creatures that stand upright like men and wield claws of iron.
Saga’s prayers turn to weeping as she falls to her knees and drops her sword back among the scattered bones. I stand over her, trying to protect her, but it’s no use.
The winged monsters fall on me, claws tearing at my back and my scalp. Pain and death rush up to devour me whole. I never wanted to die like this. Not in the dark. Never in the dark.
And then—
A sudden blur of orange light, somewhere outside the shadows.
An earsplitting roar and a whirl of white.
Monsters torn off me, slashed and broken and flung to the ground. A flash of teeth and the black eyes of a massive arctic bear. It towers over me, nearly twice my height, grabbing at the creatures, killing them with a single swipe of its enormous paw.
The monsters flee from the arctic bear, screaming in fear and pain, and the bear roars after them, its teeth dripping black with their blood.
I cling to Saga among the bodies, the bones, and we shake, shake.
A voice, sharp and smooth as sunlight: “Peace, Asvaldr. They have gone.”
The bear backs away from us, dropping down to all fours, and that’s when I see the man holding the torch at the back of the cavern.
That’s when I see Ballast.
Chapter Ten
Year4200, Month of the Black God
Daeros—Tenebris
Kallias is slouched like a sulky child on the couch in his private receiving room. The couch faces an elaborate metal screen on the left wall, heat coiling out of it. I’m in my usual hiding spot in the ceiling, wisps of heat escaping from the vents to whisper tantalizingly around my freezing face.
Both Nicanor and Basileious, the king’s engineer, are standing by him. Nicanor looks exhausted, the heavy dark circles under his dull eyes making his face appear even paler than usual. His knuckles are bruised, and there are flecks of blood on the cuffs and hem of his elaborate fur robe. Rage twists through me. I know where he’s been—tormenting the whole of Kallias’s Collection for singing their rebellious hymn.
But I’m not sure Kallias even knows Nicanor is here: His whole attention is focused on Basileious.
“You’ve been promising me foryearsthat we’re almost in,” he snarls.
Sweat beads on Basileious’s broad forehead, his spectacles slipping down his nose. “We—we are, Your Majesty,” he stammers, shoving his spectacles nervously back up again. “But the rock is ...resistantto our drills, our axes. We’re trying. We’re working as diligently as we can.”
“Then Try Harder!” Kallias shrieks, jerking up from the couch and grabbing Basileious by the collar. I flinch as Kallias flingshim to the floor in front of the heating grate, and the engineer just stays there, frightened as a rabbit.
My heart drums overquick. I haven’t heard anything about Kallias digging for the Iljaria weapon since that conversation two years ago, when the Aeronan ambassador Talan gave his emperor’s ultimatum: Find it and surrender it to Aerona, or be invaded. I think of Vil’s caginess when Leifur brought up the story of the weapon on the road, the night Indridi—
I push that memory away and refocus on the scene below me.
Kallias paces the floor beneath my hiding spot. He has never, I suppose, learned to look up. Perhaps Vil and Saga are right. Perhaps hedoesn’tknow it’s me. My foot cramps and I grimace.
“If I may, Your Majesty,” says Basileious from the floor.
“Get up, fool,” the king snaps at him.
Basileious obeys. Nicanor just stands tensely by the couch, forgotten.
“We have made a hole,” Basileious explains. He straightens his robe and shoves his spectacles up onto his nose again.
