Part 30 (1/2)
Purity helped the weak thing to her feet, uncertain what to do. But Prama nodded her crested head at the golden sphere high above.
”Please,” she begged, ”take me there.”
That had been Purity's intent, but now it was a royal decree. Supporting the aesr, Purity and Prama took the first of a thousand steps.
They made it to the first tier before Prama collapsed against the side of the second telescoped platform, leaning her head against the metal and breathing heavily. Above, the black whorl of lich-lords grew steadily larger as, slowly, the host descended.
One dark contrail split off from the swirling ma.s.s and veered downward, speeding toward Purity and Prama with a cackle and streaks of red lightning. It landed in a cloud and drifted toward them with steepled fingers. Fingerbones.
Purity screamed. The lich reared back, offended.
Purity screamed again, and pointed at the undead thing. The lich followed her finger, and looked behind itself to see if perhaps there was something relevant, but no-just an offensive child and her predictable noise.
Purity found herself and slapped her own cheek twice, hard. She set her jaw and spoke through clenched teeth: ”The undead are not welcome within the royal precinct. By the authority of my father, the Baron Kloo, who sits upon the Circle Unsung at the foot of Fflaen the Fair, I remand you to your sky. This world will not suffer the footstep of the unliving. Please leave.”
”Oh.” It c.o.c.ked its head, disregarding the once-reliable banishment of its kind from the City Unspoken. Instead it drifted closer to Purity, half- hiding behind a brace of skinned chinchilla, green eyefire aghast but exploratory. ”What are you.” The lich didn't ask the question so much as accuse Purity of existing in s.p.a.ce through which it had chosen to move.
”You may address me as Lady Kloo if you must, thing.” Purity snapped the retort before she could stop herself, and for a startled moment she wondered whether those would be her last words. The lich-lord seemed to be considering the same possibility, but Purity interrupted it with more insane bravado. ”And who, what, and why might you be?” She pressed on. In for a nickeldime, in for a dirty, I suppose.
The lich turned its head a fraction of an inch. ”I am freedom, I am your death, and I am because the world isss unfair to pretty little girlsss who wander where they oughtn't.” It raised a bony hand that radiated a cold beyond cold and pointed to Prama, still slumped against the wall of the platform. ”I have come to retrieve my slave.”
Purity lifted her chin and stared the thing straight in its flaming eye sockets. ”Really! I don't think I'll let a fleshless n.o.body accost me in my own home. Have you any idea what my friends will do to you when they see the revolting way you've styled your hair? Staple all the chunky gold in the worlds to your face, bless your tiny coal heart, and it still won't hide that mess you piled atop your head.” She forced herself to sound snide but had to admit, it wasn't as hard as perhaps it ought to be.
”I beg your pardon?” If the lich had eyelids it would have gaped, and it pressed one ring-barnacled claw against its chest.
”Bitzy will have fits, and then we'll have to bleach lich-droppings out of our slippers. Have you any idea how hard it is to lift putrefaction humors from satin?” She looked the thing up and down; was it naked under those furs? ”No, I daresay you might not.”
”Oh? Girl. Woe to those with the poor sense to love you. They wake to misery today.”
But Prama cried out, a sound somewhere between a keening wail and a war cry. Groaning with the effort, she stood: and a woman robed in sunlight stepped forward, radiating brilliance from her skin. Pinp.r.i.c.k lights danced up her sides and curled around her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Bright things like wings or windblown drapery fluttered behind her, and her crested head was obscured by a cowl of light. She stood nearly twice as tall as Purity, and walked past the young n.o.blewoman as if she did not exist.
The lich retreated before the Prama's illuminated approach. Wing- shaped protuberances on her b.u.t.tocks and back wafted wide open, their tips s.h.i.+ning like the sun.
Bells, but she's tall when she's not hunched over and moaning, Purity thought.
”Do you know my given name, lich?” Prama's voice was low and sweet and ripe with pain. ”We have tasted each other, you and I. Would you like another sip?”
”Oh?” The lich giggled and looked around as if seeking an exit. ”Not necessary, really.” It drifted back further, almost to the precipice of the platform. Below lay the wooden corpses of the Groveheart, tossed with mud.
She stared unblinking at the lich from one single eye that was set in the middle of her crest and burned several colors at once. ”The fun we'll have,” she promised, low and throaty.
”Please. Forgive me. Your grace.” The lich shuddered. ”I seek amnesty!”
”Not an option.” A smile like clouds parting, and a shake of her luminous head.
Prama sighed, a sound like a pipe organ wrestling a piccolo, and flared her open wing-fins. She focusing her light on a point inches from the lich's fur-swathed chest.
”I will do you a kindness,” Prama said sweetly, ”and grant you the mercy you denied me, for so long. Although it will hurt.”
The ball of light inched toward the lich, who appeared paralyzed, and as the light touched its chest the undead thing began to howl. Into the black substance swathing its body Prama pushed the ball of light, and the lich-lord's rusty bones began to glow with a cleansing, golden light. The green fire in its eyes flickered yellow, then gold, and finally its skull was transformed into pure quartz crystal, clear but riddled with milky flaws.
The fire disappeared from its eyes, the black smoke melted away from its bones, and the lich-lord collapsed in a pile, a crystal skull amidst bones of shattered gla.s.s.
”The cure for undeath,” Prama turned to Purity, ”is life.” Then she collapsed, sobbing, and Purity could not bring herself to touch the sunlit heir.
”That's her!” a man's voice called out from the stairs below. ”That's the aesr we saved atop the towers! That's the woman who's been screaming at me for days!”
A man and a woman rushed up the steps behind them. Sesstri nodded at Purity but immediately began tending to the wounded, traumatized aesr.
”Who are you?” Cooper asked Purity.
”Who are you?” she replied.
”I'm CooperOmphale, and I'm the center of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned metaverse.”
Purity clucked. Why fight? ”And I am Lady Purity Kloo, daughter of Baron Emil Kloo, who sits on the Circle Unsung. And this,” she indicated Prama, ”is Prince Fflaen's daughter, Prama-Ramay Afflaena-Uchara.”
Cooper shrugged. ”I saved her, you know. After a whole lotta torture.”
”So,” Purity said through clenched teeth, ”did I.”
No one inside the Dome would have recognized their prince as he crawled out of the earth. The creature who'd ruled them had been ineffable, cyclopean, and made of light. The wretch who returned to the scene of his crime looked none of these things. He'd crawled across rock as sharp as gla.s.s and pulled himself up through half a hundred different stairwells, many empty of stairs, when he'd scaled the ancient wells with his fingers and toes and an ugly determination to put right what he'd abandoned.
Asher's first breath of topside air filled his lungs with the scents he'd forgotten-wet peat, moss, the bark- and-vine smell of the old forest, which had grown here before his ancestors arrived to build a city. Behind him, the billionstone bones of the Pet.i.te Malaison shone through cracks and windows of the building like sunlight. He was home. She was home.
”Is it time, then?” a voice asked from beneath an arbor. ”All the fun will be over, you know.” Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises fiddled with his rings. He sounded almost sad.
”You had fun,” Asher answered. ”I had pain.”
”Oh, I don't know about that.” The marquis rolled a chip across his knuckles and savored a little smile. ”It wasn't entirely unpleasant, was it? You met your lady love, gambled and drank with an old friend. We had times, Your Grace. We had times.”
Asher said nothing. Formal language hurt his ears, after so long a time away, and so many crimes that made him unworthy of it.
”You never told me why you did it. Why you locked them up.” Oxnard peered out from beneath his black brows.
”They deserved it.”
Terenz-de-Guises put his hand on his friend's shoulder. ”And you didn't?”
Asher looked up, perhaps a million years old, looking like a child who was sorry he'd been bad. ”I should have been. It was simple selfishness that stopped me, nothing more.”
”She's here, you know. Of course you know- but . . .” Oxnard bit his lip and looked, for once, n.o.ble. ”She will make all the difference in the worlds, Your Grace. And you can be free, then, at last.”
Asher nodded, his eyes watering. His cindercysts had already begun to regrow; he could feel them burning between his ribs. It wouldn't be long.
”Did you find your red metal jewelry box, milord?” he asked.