Chapter 26: The Undying

Frankie

Azrath stood beneath the heartglass in the robes Liora had refused to make.

Nine collars. Liora had a point.

“Francesco,” he said. “You have brought your answer.”

Aldric raised his sword.

“We have.”

The Boss didn’t look at him.

“I was speaking to my son.”

Son.

I nearly answered him.

Then I saw the threads inside the glass.

“You should’ve listened when he spoke to you,” I said.

Azrath lifted his hand.

The doors slammed behind us.

The first spell struck Aldric’s shield.

White light met black fire, and the stone beneath our feet cracked like ice.

I went right and shot twice into the silver fittings beside the glass. One shattered. The other swallowed the bullets and spat molten metal across the wall.

One fitting down.

Two bullets I wasn’t getting back.

Azrath turned his hand toward me.

I threw myself behind the table as the robes and ceremonial cup lifted into the air. The table hit me anyway. My suit flared along the ribs, but a jagged corner tore through the shoulder seam. Blood ran down my arm. Something inside the lining broke with a sharp little snap.

I rolled clear before the stone came down again.

Aldric reached him.

The sword cut through a raised arm. Bone broke. Holy light raced along the fracture.

Azrath cried out. I’d never heard pain in his voice before.

Then the heartglass brightened, and the bone grew back.

“Glass,” I gasped.

“I see it.”

“Then stop hitting the part that grows back.”

“You are welcome to distract him.”

I brought the Thompson up and held the trigger long enough to regret the bill.

White fire broke across Azrath’s chest, tearing his robes and shattering the ribs beneath them. He staggered away from Al with one hand clamped over a hole that showed the wall behind him.

He looked from the gun to the paladin.

“What have you given him?”

“Help,” Al said.

The heartglass flared.

Bone drew itself together inside the ruined robes. The hole closed. Azrath straightened, but Al had his breath back and I had made it to the next pillar.

We could hurt him now.

Keeping him hurt was the problem.

The drum ran empty. I slung the Thompson and drew the Colt.

The side door opened.

Mara came through first, followed by Liora and Brannik. Hobb held the corridor behind them. Benny stayed at the doorway, one knife in each hand.

“The outer channels are isolated,” Mara said. “The last junction is here.”

She pointed to the base of the heartglass.

Of course it was.

Azrath looked at her.

“You have been allowed an extraordinary amount of influence.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s got good ideas. You oughta try one sometime.”

Aldric drove him back from the junction. I crossed behind the paladin, firing at anything with a binding mark. The Colt slide locked open. I changed magazines with fingers that had begun to shake.

Brannik reached the mechanism with his injured hand held against his chest.

“Mara. Lower lever. Hold it. Liora, the return line.”

They moved.

The threads inside the glass twisted.

Azrath stopped looking amused.

He drew on the town.

I felt it through the floor before I understood what had changed. A pulling sensation deep in my chest. The sudden certainty that if I stopped breathing for even a moment, the room might decide to keep the breath.

Mara staggered.

Brannik shouted a word I couldn’t hear over the glass beginning to sing.

Outside the windows, dawn had reached the valley.

The rite had begun.

“The church line!” Mara said.

“Blue junction,” Brannik answered.

“There are two.”

“Which district is still connected?”

She looked at the pattern, then at her ledger map.

“Lower square. The well feeds both.”

Liora looped her silk through the second junction.

The pulling stopped.

Not everywhere. Not yet.

But I could breathe again.

Mara kept the lever down with both hands.

Azrath raised a hand toward her.

I got between them.

The blow made no sound. The suit took most of it.

I hit the floor with blood in my mouth and the smell of burned cloth around me.

Liora shouted something about the lining.

I would apologize if I lived.

The corridor behind us filled with dead guards.

Hobb broke the first one’s spine. Benny took the second at the knee and drove a blade beneath its skull. A third reached the doorway while Hobb was still turning.

Liora held the silk connecting the junctions. If she let go, the town went back into the glass.

Benny saw it.

He stepped between her and the guard.

The guard’s sword went into him beneath the ribs.

I heard Mara shout his name.

Benny caught the dead man’s wrist, held it close, and put his knife through the base of its skull.

Both of them fell.

When Hobb reached him, the old man pushed him away.

“Door,” he said.

Hobb roared and turned back to the corridor.

Aldric’s sword struck the heartglass’s outer frame.

The light rang like a bell.

Azrath caught the blade between both hands.

Al drove forward with both hands on the hilt.

The Boss’s fingers burned white. He held on.

Then Azrath drove him backward.

Aldric hit the broken table. I heard his armor buckle. The sword slid across the floor toward me.

I caught it.

It was heavy. The blade held no light.

I hauled myself upright and swung at the frame.

The blade bounced.

Azrath looked at me with something like pity.

“You see? His blessing has limits. You cannot borrow conviction by picking up a better man’s weapon.”

He turned toward Aldric, who was trying to rise with one arm folded wrong beneath him.

Al was on the floor with no weapon in his hands.

Once before, that hadn’t been enough for me.

I put myself in the way.

“Leave him.”

The sword warmed in my hands.

Light ran along it.

Not much.

Enough.

I caught the spell on the blade, and the room filled with white fire.

From the floor, Aldric gave a breathless, miserable little laugh.

“I told you.”

“Terrible time, Al.”

Azrath reached for the glass.

Mara was still at the lever. Brannik had wedged his good arm through the mechanism to keep it from closing. Liora’s hands bled where the thread cut into them.

One silver line remained bright.

“Which one?” I shouted.

Mara checked it against the map, then glanced toward the corridor where Benny lay.

“The tavern.”

The injured. Rosella’s helpers. Everybody we’d moved when the church filled.

They were still in there.

Azrath closed his hand.

The line pulled tight.

Benny’s last knife struck him through the wrist.

It didn’t kill him.

It made him let go.

Liora cut the thread.

Brannik drove the return latch home.

Every line leading out of the chamber went dark.

Mara threw her whole weight against the lowering wheel.

The heartglass dropped.

“Now, Frankie!”

I swung with both hands.

The blade went through the glass.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the world seemed to breathe out.

Red light poured through the crack. The silver lines folded inward, tearing free of the walls. Azrath reached toward the broken globe, and his fingers began to come apart before they touched it.

He looked past the sword to my face.

“I loved you,” he said.

I believed him. Wish I hadn’t.

“I know.”

The glass shattered.

Azrath the Undying died.

* * *

The light left the sword.

I dropped to my knees beside Benny.

Hobb had cleared the doorway. Brannik leaned against the wall, gray with pain. Liora knelt opposite me, still holding the severed silk like she couldn’t make her fingers understand they were allowed to stop.

Aldric crawled toward us.

Benny looked at him.

“Save it.”

The paladin tried anyway.

A little light gathered beneath his palm.

Not enough.

Benny knew before any of us admitted it.

“Rosella?” he asked.

“At the church,” I said. “She’s safe.”

“Good.”

He swallowed.

I pressed both packets of bandages against the wound. The ones she’d made him take.

He noticed.

“She’ll say I should’ve taken three.”

I tried to laugh and couldn’t manage it.

“Tell her,” he said, and stopped to breathe. “Tell her I came back for them this time.”

“I’ll tell her.”

He looked past me toward the doorway, as though he expected to see her standing there with flour on her hands and an opinion about what we’d done to the floor.

Then he stopped looking.

I kept holding the bandages.

For a while, nobody told me I could let go.

* * *

Outside, the boundary markers went dark.

People ran into the roads and found they could keep running. The dead guards fell where their bindings depended on Azrath. Others stood motionless, waiting for an order nobody would ever give.

Somebody outside started cheering.

We’d won.

I looked down at the bandages. Benny’s blood had soaked both packets through.

Mara knelt behind me and put her arms around my shoulders.

I leaned back against her.

Then the old exchange circle began to glow.

Brannik lifted his head. Blue-white light trembled in the cracked runes, nothing like the red of the heartglass. A doorway appeared above them, thin as a sheet hung in moving air.

Through it came rain, coal smoke, and the distant sound of an automobile horn.

I knew that sound.

I knew that air.

Somewhere on the other side, Chicago was waiting.