The Barther Family (4)

Lashar opened his eyes.

The smell of salt came surging in, the reek of fish, the brine, until he could not draw a breath at all. The last thing he remembered was the whole sweep of Siltrein breaking apart, and a ghost hurling itself at him. So why had he opened his eyes in a void with nothing in it? He put his thoughts in order.

So I have been possessed by that ghost?

Erbern holds as many spirit-bodies as it does people. The Barther viscount’s house rules that land, and the Barthers are the very ones who made Erbern what it is; for a member of that house, magic to detect a spirit-body and deal with it was the very first thing one learned. And still he had not been able to snuff it out, and still he had been possessed.

…Why would a ghost of that caliber come after me?

If there was one person in this city a ghost must never possess, surely that was Lashar, who could see them and kill them as easily? Either it had lost all sense of what stood in front of it, or there was someone in Siltrein it had to protect whatever the cost to itself.

Lashar raised himself up. In a place with no notion of up or down or left or right, it would be truer to say that he stretched himself out. His body swayed this way and that, as though an enormous current had hold of it.

“A fairly troublesome ghost, that.”

He could see nothing and feel nothing, and yet the pull of the water came through clearly enough, a pull that seemed to be scouring his soul away.

A vile smell of salt, thick darkness, a churning current.

Lashar closed his eyes. To look with the naked eye on the emergence of a Great Old One would grind his soul to powder.

Directly after, the void began to heave.

The void, the source, the beginning, the end.

The sea comes surging in. He does not look, and still he sees it; he does not try to feel, and still he feels it. A sea that sweeps the world under and drowns it, that wipes history clean away, is stirring into life.

When Lashar lifted his eyelids and gazed at the sea, the sea gazed back at him.

Lashar knows.

An afterlife exists. It is only that it is not heaven, and not hell. When human beings die they go to another dimension, one higher than this, and there they come face to face with something beyond describing. That something breaks the mind at the mere sight of it and carries it off into madness, and the things that have looked upon it are precisely the ghosts.

“To meet the sea, of all things. An unlucky ghost.”

Lashar, unlike the ghosts, did not go mad on facing the sea; a magic that erases the memory at once saw to that. And that is where the process of breaking a possession begins. To wake out of it in earnest afterward, the thing beyond describing must first be described.

Lashar drew a small breath. There was no telling what might happen if he carelessly uttered the name of a thing of a high dimension, an Outer God. The instant the word is out of his mouth, it erases every memory. The smell of salt, the reek of fish, the brine, all of it forgotten.

Lashar spoke it under his breath.

A sea that has existed since the first days, and that has promised the end.

“Dagon.”¹

Lilian tipped her head back. Beneath a sky stained ash-gray, she could see Lashar dropping fast. How good it would be if he went straight into the ground just like that.

But the sound of wind reached her before long, and Lilian let out a deep sigh. She had never expected it to finish that cheaply; still, now that he had actually come round, there was no helping the irritation that rose in her.

Against the wind whipping down, Lilian raised an arm. The powerful storm Lashar was raising swept the whole area in an instant, and her with it. Keen wind split the air into fine pieces, and the chips of stone and the dust blinding her slashed at her inside the whirlwind. The storm was not there to attack her at all, only to set him down, and even so its destructive force left her unable to draw a proper breath. An ordinary human being would already have been crushed under the pain and lost consciousness.

Even so, Lilian gazed quietly straight ahead.

Though her whole body was laid open, though the dress went on soaking through with fresh blood.

Her will was not so thin a thing as to faint away at mere pain.

Not until the dress had gone entirely red did Lashar notice her, resisting the storm with her whole body.

However strong the will, in the end she is human.

A human being who dies at one light motion of the hand, like an ant that dies the instant a fingernail presses down on it.

Without a shred of hesitation Lashar stretched out a hand, aiming at Lilian.

As he had done to a great many human beings.

A small vortex rose, and the air compressed to a single point. With the storm clawing at her whole body and an arrow of wind poised to run her head through, Lilian thought.

Roan.

Had Roan, who would have set out for Esmartin, met an opponent like this one too? Had he too stood before a mighty storm, before air massing itself into something overbearing? If it had been Roan, would he have dealt with a mage like this in an instant?

Can I do it?

Lilian is not Roan. She could not walk up to a mage as though it were nothing and take his arm off, nor drag the fight out until his magical power ran dry.

Even so, I have to.

But even so.

Not Roan, not Rodrik. Me.

Since Siltrein was founded, the mercenary who has settled the most commissions and holds the respect of the most residents is not Roan but Lilian.

Lilian certainly could not become Roan, but because she too could accomplish what Roan could not—

“Aaaaaaaaaah!”

—she stretched out her own arm to meet him.

Her arm, held out as though in mockery of the hand Lashar had leveled at her.

Lashar could not hide his puzzlement. But the puzzlement soon became doubt, and before long the doubt became astonishment. Most of the magical power flowing through his Arcane Heart vanished as though it had never been there at all. If his usual magical power was an enormous lake, what he had now amounted to a small puddle.

The whirlwind that had been shaking the street apart scattered in a moment, and Lashar, no longer able to hold the magic, fell fast. Set at last on Siltrein’s ground, he glared at Lilian.

“…What have you done.”

She had spent the last several months practicing that application of holy power, and had not missed a single day. She had tried it on Rodrik before, true, but having it work at once, and on the first attempt in a real fight at that, left Lilian feeling, to exaggerate only a little, as though she might lift off the ground.

Lilian only stood there gripping at her heart, and Lashar shouted at her irritably.

“A mage? Why would a mage come crawling all the way into Siltrein?”

Lilian drew one breath in, and only then answered him.

“Can’t even tell magical power from holy power, can you? That’s what comes of being shut away in a corner like this.”

“…Savages out of some church, then.”

A mage ordinarily keeps countermeasures ready against the day his magical power is cut off. Other mages are rare enough to be beside the point, but priests who handle holy power are, relatively speaking, everywhere you look.

There could be no priests in Erbern, so the house of Barther alone was vulnerable to this most basic cutting-off of magical power. If the Barther viscount’s house ever left Erbern and came out into the world, it would have to turn tail from something as ordinary as a Talios priest of Pirberk, who is not even a mage.

“You did well to catch me by the ankle with that filthy holy power. And what do you mean to do now? Swing your fists at me?”
“If I have to, I will. Though you look like a waste of my fists.”
“A priest who bows and scrapes to others and eats the crumbs, and yet the tongue works well enough. That will be how you begged your holy power out of someone. Who is the god you serve?”
“Your great-grandfather.”

Lashar ground his teeth hard enough to break them.

“You are more stupid than you look. I can still use magic, and the whole of what you can do is flap your mouth. Can that fine holy power of yours raise a wind? Can it call up undead? I set the terms; you take them.”
“Go on and try, then.”

Lashar wrung his whole body out and dragged up every scrap of magical power he had and did not have. He meant to tear the human in front of him to pieces even if his Arcane Heart broke doing it. All the long while he gathered it and made his magic ready, Lilian stood there, bold as anything, and did nothing but watch him.

“You’re really quivering away at it. Want a hand? Shall I let a little of your magical power go?”
“Nn, nnngh!”

At Lilian’s words Lashar gathered magical power more fiercely still.

His body shaking like a leaf, and the moment enough magical power had gathered to loose a single stroke of wind—

“I’ll kill you!”

—Lashar thrust out his hand at once and raised the wind.

“Being mistaken is one thing, but—”

His wind could not reach Lilian.

“—calling me a priest, that’s just offensive.”

Like paint stamped onto drawing paper, a bright scarlet spread across the dull sky.

Lashar looked at his own arm lying on the ground with eyes that could not take it for real.

“Agh, aaaaaargh!”

The thing that had cut Lashar’s arm away, a death knight, shook its rusted sword out roughly. The flashing glow of its eyes showed clearly how furious it was.

Beyond the mist off the water beginning to fill the streets again, the faint sound of hooves rang out.

A pack of thirty skeleton knights will wipe out a whole city, will it not? To be able to break something means, in the end, that you can also protect something.

The undead knight order, drawn once more by Lilian’s call, had just this moment set foot in Siltrein. The death knight, first of them to arrive, drove its horse forward and stood before Lilian as though guarding her. The thick, clinging killing intent of a high undead, enough to set the air trembling, was closing tight around the whole of Lashar’s body.

A fist near at hand is more frightening than a sword far off, isn’t that how it goes? Lashar was far more afraid of the death knight in front of him, which could kill him this instant, than of the apparition of an Outer God that could not touch him.

Sitting down hard and clutching the cut end of his arm, Lashar looked at the death knight, and at Lilian behind it, with eyes that could not believe them.

“This… this cannot be…”

A ghost’s possession he could understand, and the cutting-off of his magical power, and running into a death knight. But all of it at once, is that not another matter entirely? To Lashar, Lilian standing under the death knight’s protection now felt like an inexplicable disaster.

Lilian, of course, had no intention of explaining anything to him, nor of arguing with him. She only added one small thing.

“Kill him.”

It was a cruel world still, and her back was far too small for it.

Even so.

— SHUNK!

She too was a person living in that world, and carrying a great many burdens.

Once she had seen Lashar’s head come rolling off, Lilian sat down on the ground as though collapsing. The dress Rodrik had given her was rags now, and her stamina had run dry a long while ago; if she let the tension slacken even a little, she felt she would faint on the spot.

The death knight got down from its horse and carefully lifted the swaying Lilian up onto it. The horse was undead, its flesh rotted and sloughed away until about half the bone showed, but the ride was unexpectedly soft and not bad at all.

After a little more waiting the skeleton knights pushed through the mist and showed themselves.

“You, go to Esmartin, I mean… go to the south wall and keep watch, and if you find a human being, tell me. The rest of you, put the city in order and help the people buried under the rubble. No, would that frighten them? Just clear up, then.”

At Lilian’s command the death knight set off south, and the skeleton knights began to spread out across the whole of half-ruined Siltrein. The death knight had gone off alone and left her sitting up on the horse, so Lilian found herself in the middle of a wrecked street with only the horse for company.

“And… you…”

With those words Lilian slumped forward onto the undead horse’s back and fell fast asleep.

The death knight’s beloved mount, the one it had cherished and doted on, let out a bewildered cry that rang across Siltrein.