Chapter 52-The Cultists(3)

Chapter 52: 52-The Cultists(3)

Not a single drop of his soul reached the sky.

Across the entire gravel embankment beneath the overpass, the battle stopped dead.

The pullers who had been scrambling over the rocks froze on all fours.

The third High-Stage acolyte dropped the end of his iron chain into the snow.

Even Sister Mara stopped five feet from Sol, her sewn-shut eyelids twitching violently as her nose drank in the smell of burned lunar mist.

For three full seconds, the only sound under the highway bridge was the wind whistling through the rusted rebar and the soft hiss of black ash settling onto the gray snow around Sol’s boots.

Father Julian stood halfway down the slope, his silver skinning-knife frozen in his hand, staring at the black smudge in the snow where a High-Stage Choir acolyte had just been erased from existence.

"The mist..." one of the barefoot pullers whispered, his voice cracking like a terrified child’s as he pointed a shaking, frostbitten finger at Sol’s glowing orange hatchet.

"It didn’t go up. He... he burned it. He ate Brother Vane’s ascent!"

Father Julian’s pale face went from calm shepherd to a mask of purple, vein-bulging horror.

When he looked up at Sol this time, the linen blindfold around Sol’s head had slipped half an inch during the swing, revealing the unmistakable, miniature sun blazing behind his right eye.

"The Old Thief," Father Julian breathed, his voice shaking so hard the bronze bell on his staff rattled against the stones.

"From the First Book of the Eclipse... the fire that steals the dead from the Mother’s mouth! He is a Sun Devil!"

"A devil!" Sister Mara shrieked, tearing at the skin of her own cheeks with her bone-splinter nails until blood poured down her neck.

"He burns the grace into dirt! If he touches you, you cannot rise! If he kills you, the Mother never sees your face!"

Sol wrenched his hatchet out of the dead acolyte’s soot-covered collarbone and stepped back beside Valera, breathing hard as orange steam curled off his shoulders.

"Well," Sol muttered to Valera as twenty-nine cultists began to hyperventilate, their purple cores expanding to the point of self-detonation as their religious ecstasy turned into rabid, frothing hysteria.

"So much for hiding in the ditch."

"Put out the fire!" Father Julian roared, his voice cracking into a deafening, lunatic howl as he threw his bell-staff aside and lunged down the slope with his Peak-Stage purple aura exploding outward in jagged spikes of frost-rot.

"Drown his chest in your blood, my children! Do not let his fire taint the air! Tear his heart out with your teeth!"

They didn’t attack like human beings anymore.

Earlier, the cultists had wanted to capture Sol and Valera alive to bleed them on the mirror.

Now, driven out of their minds by the terror of a fire that could destroy their afterlife, the twenty-nine remaining members of the White Choir attacked like a swarm of rabid hornets trying to smother a wasp inside their hive.

Five of the barefoot Low-Stage pullers threw themselves headfirst down the rocks at Sol at the exact same time, not swinging weapons, just opening their mouths and stretching their frostbitten hands out to pile their bodies on top of his hatchet and smother the heat with their own meat.

"Back to the pier!" Valera yelled.

She slammed both Night-iron gauntlets flat against the concrete support column behind them and pushed a wide, semicircular wall of jagged blue ice spikes outward at waist height, impaling three of the diving pullers in mid-air before they could reach Sol’s legs.

Even with two feet of blue ice punched straight through their stomachs, the three impaled zealots didn’t stop moving.

They grabbed the ice spikes with their hands and pulled themselves further down the shafts, kicking their broken legs and spitting mouthfuls of purple, tainted blood toward Sol’s face to try and blind him or put out his heat.

Sol swung his glowing hatchet from left to right, taking the heads off two of them and kicking the fourth man back into the fifth with a boot that caved in the man’s breastbone.

Before he could reset his feet, Sister Mara and the remaining High-Stage acolyte came over the top of the ice wall together, while Father Julian came low around the left flank, his curved silver skinning-knife trailing a two-foot ribbon of dense, necrotic Peak-Stage frost.

"Take the blind bitch!" Sol barked at Valera, pivoting on his heel to meet the Peak-Stage priest himself.

Father Julian didn’t use stances like the inner-city nobles.

The Choir fought with the ugly, lopsided brutality of people who viewed their own broken bones as a badge of honor.

Julian swung his left forearm, thick with embedded, jagged lunar crystals sticking out of the skin like a spiked club straight at Sol’s face, while bringing the curved silver skinning-knife up from underneath toward Sol’s groin and femoral artery.

Sol ducked his chin, letting the crystal-studded forearm graze the side of his skull, the sharp stones tearing his blindfold completely off and opening three bleeding gashes across his temple.

Then he brought the carbon-steel hatchet down with both hands against Julian’s rising knife hand.

Wait, Julian wasn’t trying to stab him with the knife.

At the last fraction of a second, the Peak-Stage priest rotated his wrist, catching the bearded blade of Sol’s hatchet inside the deep, hooked curve of the sacrificial silver knife and twisting sideways with all of his mutated Peak-Stage strength, right against the fifteen-degree bend the Silt-Serpent had left in Sol’s handle two days ago

"Break, devil!" Julian spat in Sol’s face.

Sol pumped a violent burst of solar heat down the tang to soften the priest’s silver blade first.

And the hairline fracture in the middle of Marrow’s old-world carbon steel finally gave out under the combined torque of two Peak-Stage cultivators and twelve hundred degrees of thermal stress.

PING-SNAP!

The six-pound bearded head of the hatchet sheared cleanly off the handle three inches below the eye, spinning away into the snowbank with the priest’s ruined knife twisted around it, leaving Sol standing in the middle of twenty screaming fanatics holding ten inches of blunt, broken steel handle.