Chapter 203: The war 2

Luceriel

The first minute was gone. Luceriel could feel it leaving, grain by grain.

Across the lower terrace, Malachi and Sariel held two of the lords blind inside a dome of living shadow, Malachi’s elvish darkness laced through with Sariel’s own, bitter and gold-edged and furious.

Tobias stood at their backs with a spear of pale Elysian light, turning aside every blow that came through.

Raizel and Thamiel held the barrier over the western slope, where the remaining lords had begun hurling fire in long red arcs that burst harmlessly against its surface and ran down it like rain down a window.

And on the second terrace, Lumiel had stopped moving.

Luceriel saw it at once, because he had been waiting for it. The lord wearing Anabelle stood a few paces in front of his brother, dark curls loose around a face that had been dead for four hundred years and showed it only at the edges. She had lowered her blade. She was speaking.

"Lumiel," she said, in a voice that must have been hers. "Lumiel, my love. You came."

Lumiel’s sword arm dropped by an inch.

Luceriel’s sight opened without his permission.

It came the way it always came, a flash behind the eyes, half a second of what had not happened yet laid over what had. He saw the borrowed blade rise. He saw it open his brother’s throat from ear to ear while Lumiel stood there listening to a dead woman say his name.

He did not think. Thinking was for lesser men.

"Stop." The word left him in a snarl.

A second ring of emerald light snapped shut around the lord’s sword hand, and the blade froze one finger’s width from Lumiel’s throat.

The cost struck him like a fist. Two targets instead of one, and the hold on Draca screamed through every channel in his body. Something warm ran from his nose and over his lip. He did not wipe it away.

Luceriel. Pazuzu’s voice through the bond had lost all its teasing. You are overreaching.

I do not overreach, Luceriel answered. I reach.

He poured more of himself into it, and felt Pazuzu, without another word of argument, pour more into him.

"Lumiel!" His voice cracked across the terraces like a whip. "She would have despised you for hesitating. Do not shame her memory by dying at the hands of the thing wearing her."

His brother’s head came up.

Luceriel watched the grief go out of Lumiel’s face, and watched the rage come in to replace it, and he had never in his long life been so grateful to see his brother angry.

Lumiel’s sword burst into flame.

He did not strike her with rage. That was the thing Luceriel would remember afterward, long after the rest of the battle had faded into noise.

Lumiel stepped in close, almost gently, and drove the burning blade through her heart the way a man might lay a hand on the chest of someone he loved, and he held it there while the fire took the borrowed body from the inside. When it was over, he stood alone in the ash with his head bowed.

The second anchor broke.

Below, a second crack split Kaevian’s face, from the brow down across the bridge of his nose, and a third ran down his throat. Beneath the emerald rings, Draca’s frozen body shuddered.

His lips moved.

"You cannot hold me forever, Pride," he said, the words slow and dragging, as though pushed up through deep water. "I have seen how this ends."

Luceriel released Lumiel’s attacker with a flick of his fingers and turned the whole of his attention back where it belonged. He looked down at the Demon King with blood drying on his lip and every ounce of contempt he had spent centuries perfecting.

"You have seen how it ended," he said. "You have never seen me."

He closed his fist.

The rings of the time lock tightened by a full turn, and Draca’s mouth stopped moving.

Two minutes had passed, and his knees wanted to bend, but he would not permit them.

"Luceriel." Solmira’s voice was careful. "Let us take more of the weight."

He wanted to refuse her. Every part of him that remembered the dark beneath Elysium wanted to tell her to keep her borrowed light to herself, that he had not survived centuries of their cruelty only to lean on them now, in front of his brothers, in front of the Demon King himself. The idea of owing anything to Elysium sat in his throat like a stone.

But his legs were shaking, and the rings around Draca had begun to flicker at their edges, and pride that let the hold slip would be nothing but vanity.

"Do it," he said through his teeth. "Quickly. Before I change my mind."

Solmira and Elios stepped forward until they stood on either side of him, and they did not wait to be told twice.

Solmira pressed her palm flat between his shoulder blades. Elios took hold of his left wrist. Gold poured into him from both sides, warm and bright and entirely unlike Pazuzu’s dark river, and where the two powers met inside him they did not fight. They braced him, the way two walls brace a failing roof.

His knees steadied. The flickering at the edges of the rings went still.

He hated how much easier it was to breathe.

"This changes nothing between us," he said.

"We know," Elios answered quietly, and kept pouring.

On the third terrace, Azriel and Anomas were bringing the last of their three lords down.

Luceriel had watched his younger brother fight for centuries, and he had never seen him fight like this.

Azriel moved as though the ground were too slow for him. Walls of red thorned vine erupted from the flagstones wherever the lord tried to step, hemming it in, tearing at it, and between the vines came storms of diamond petals sharp enough to strip the borrowed flesh from its arms. Anomas worked the other side with his blade, steady and silent, cutting wherever Azriel opened a path.

And between every strike, Azriel looked toward the wards.

Luceriel saw him do it four times. A glance, never longer than a breath, toward where Seraphel stood pressed against the inside of the innermost layer. Each time, the next strike Azriel threw was harder than the last.

Finally, the vines closed.

They came from every side at once, wrapping the lord from ankle to throat in coils of crimson thorn, and then every flower along every vine opened at the same instant, and every petal was a blade.

Anomas stepped through the storm of them without hesitation and took the lord’s head from its shoulders in a single clean stroke.

The third anchor broke.

The shock of it ran up the time lock and struck Luceriel full in the chest, hard enough to snap his head back, and for one terrible instant every ring around Draca strained outward as though something inside was trying to burst free.

Luceriel set his jaw and held. He dragged on Pazuzu’s river and on the gold at his back at the same time, and he forced the rings closed again by nothing but will, and they closed.

Below him, Kaevian’s borrowed face split fully in two along the first crack, and pale corpse light began spilling out of the fractures, thin and sick and cold.

The body inside the time lock was no longer holding together. It was being held together, by Luceriel and nothing else, and the moment he let go, it would come apart entirely.

Which was precisely what they wanted.

"Now," he said aloud, and then, through the bond, because some things he refused to shout across a battlefield, now, husband.

With pleasure,* Pazuzu answered.

Luceriel opened his hand.

The emerald rings unwound one after another, each character fading as it passed, and he let the hold go on his own terms, not a single instant sooner than he had chosen.

The release tore back through all three of them at once.

Solmira stumbled a full step sideways and caught herself against the balustrade. Elios dropped to one knee before he could stop himself and stayed there a moment, breathing hard, his golden light guttering like a candle in a draft.

Luceriel’s legs shook. He did not kneel. He would sooner have died on that terrace than give Draca the sight of the Sin of Pride on his knees a second time.

Draca moved.

He did not attack. He did not scream. His broken face, split and spilling light, turned slowly away from Luceriel and toward the eastern end of the terrace, toward three layers of warding and the mortal standing behind them.

And Draca smiled.

"There you are, little vessel," he said.