Chương 40

The lagoon had gone white. Ice sealed the surface of the water from bank to bank, thick and opaque, and the frost had climbed the trunks of the nearest trees and coated the low brush in a brittle shell that crackled when the breeze touched it. Frost gathered in Lord Anshavar's mane. The statue of Thuraketru stood half frozen, and rime gathered in the folds of Odoshinko's robes. Lodin's breath came out in pale clouds.

The cold pressed through his clothes and found his skin, a deep cold, the kind that squeezed muscles like a vise, settled in the chest and made the lungs ache. He rose to his feet. Across the camp, Jorin Shen stood at the bank's edge, arms folded, soulsteel bands bright against the frost. Mayari Lakan had taken a position ten paces to his left, her hands loose at her sides, her dark eyes fixed on the far treeline.

Akiyama Shin knelt beside a fallen log, one hand flat on the frozen ground, his skin already sheened in the dull silver of his transformation. Dae Han crouched behind a boulder and adjusted something in his sleeve. Sarin Jeida stood apart from all of them, her crows silent on the branches above her, black shapes against the white. The far treeline was dark and still. Frost clung to every branch and leaf, and the gaps between the trunks held nothing but shadow. Then the shadows moved.

Translucent shapes poured between the frozen trees in silence, their forms indistinct at the edges. Spectral men, women, children. Mouths open, eyes vacant, arms slack at their sides. They drifted across the ice in a tide that darkened the air above the lagoon, and the cold deepened wherever they passed.

A mummified child floated forward behind the host of phantoms, funeral silks trailing beneath him, and two spectres, larger and more defined than the rest, swirled closely around its form, their faces frozen in agony. Behind the dead came something even worse. The first emerged from the treeline on eight legs, each one an elongated human arm stretched to twice its natural length, the fingers fused and filed to curved hooks of bone.

A human torso rose from the center of the splayed limbs, its lips and eyelids peeled back to reveal sharpened teeth and bulging, bloodshot eyes. It moved fast, its eight hooked toes biting the ice, its torso swaying like a mannequin on an unsteady base. A second spider emerged, this one armed with limbs sharpened to straight points that punched into the surface of the ice and left neat holes behind it.

A pack of low, fast shapes loped onto the ice, hound-bodies stitched from human legs and partial torsos, spines curved, jaws full of jagged, irregular teeth. They fanned out across the surface in a loose formation and their bone claws clicked and scraped on the ice as they moved. A chain of human torsos snaked through the trees, linked spine to spine, forty feet long or more, dozens of arms rowing it forward across the frozen lagoon in smooth, coordinated strokes.

It moved the way a serpent moves through water, and the arms on each segment reached and pulled and reached again in a rhythm that made Lodin shiver just to glance at it. More and more of them came out of the fog, too many to count in mere moments. A woman glided into view behind her creations. Tall, composed, her face uncannily perfect. A gown of sleeping human faces trailed across the ice behind her. Jorin Shen stepped onto the ice, and he was joined by Akiyama Shin and the other Steel Serpent inner disciples.

The patriarch's skin glowed and hardened, going through the same soulsteel transformation he'd seen Shin use before. They were all doing it now, becoming warriors with skin of living metal. A long iron war club appeared in Jorin Shen's hand, its striking surfaces covered in rows of gleaming soulsteel spikes. He settled its weight across one shoulder and broke into a run, and his disciples charged behind him, a line of metal men barreling across the frozen lagoon toward the advancing tide of monsters.

Mayari Lakan uncorked a small glass vial and drank. She blinked once, and when her eyes opened they had gone white, a clean luminous glow that erased her pupils and irises. She raised one hand and a sphere of pale fire condensed above her palm, dense and humming. She thrust it forward. The sphere struck the nearest spectre and the ghost burst apart in a flash of white, scattered like ash in a gale. Her Jade Nettle disciples formed a line at her flanks, palms raised, and more spheres bloomed in the cold air.

The spectral tide met a wall of holy light, and ghosts detonated across the ice in rapid succession. Lodin made to sprint toward the nearest spider, but a broad hand landed on his shoulder and stopped him cold.

"Wait a moment." Elder Wa's voice was unhurried.

"This is a diversion. Let them handle it. Keep your eyes open." Lodin vented a breath out his nostrils, nodded reluctantly. Lorn had yet to appear. The Steel Serpents hit the monsters at a full sprint. Jorin swung his war club and its spiked head caught the nearest spider flush across the ribs. The impact not only threw the creature sideways across the ice, trailing a smear of black ichor, but the force of Jorin Shen's swing swept a whole rank of monsters off its feet and sent them tumbling in the same direction.

Shin caught one of the hounds mid-lunge. He seized its malformed jaw in both hands and tore the thing apart at the spine, flung both halves aside, and turned to meet two more that came low and fast across the frozen surface. A Steel Serpent disciple to his left caught a bone-blade across the chest and the force knocked him off his feet, sent him skidding across the ice on his back. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The centipede reached the line. It coiled around a pair of disciples and squeezed, dozens of arms locking against their metal bodies, and the sound of soulsteel straining under the pressure cut through the noise of the battle. The apparent masters of these creatures, the floating mummy and the woman with the gown of faces, made no move to join the fray. On the far side, Mayari's wall of holy light was thinning.

For every ghost that burst apart, three more pressed forward from behind, and the spectral tide had begun to flow around the Jade Nettle line at both flanks, reaching for the bank where Elder Wa stood. Elder Wa's hand left Lodin's shoulder. The great frog's nostrils flared, and his eyes, vast and gold, fixed on a point beyond the battle.

"There," he said. Lodin followed his gaze. At the far bank of the lagoon, past the melee, past the ghosts and the monsters and the line of silver men, a tall figure stepped from the treeline onto the ice. Lorn. Lodin's heart lurched at the sight of him. He was thinner, paler. His lank white hair fell past his shoulders, unkempt. He wore a sleeveless black coat that hung down to his ankles, and the yantra tattoos that covered both of his bone white arms ran unbroken from his fingertips to his neck.

A mass of blue fire in the vague shape of a dragon hovered over his left shoulder, dim and guttering, a far cry from the apparition Lodin remembered from the pit beneath the Shattered Summit compound. Lorn walked across the ice toward the statue of Anshavar, stopped on the center of the lagoon's surface and turned toward the battlefield. He raised both arms and held them out to his sides, palms forward, fingers spread. His head tilted back. His hands and his face formed three points of a triangle.

Lodin's gut lurched as he watched invisible seams of flesh peel back on each of Lorn's hands to reveal rows of teeth, sharp and serrated, too many of them, packed in rows like the gullet of a shark. Then Lorn's own mouth opened, and the same sharklike teeth filled it, and a chain of concentric scars inside his throat began to glow, all three points at once, a pale light that pulsed and brightened until the sigils burned blue-white through his skin. The air in front of Lorn bent.

A vortex took shape between his three open mouths, a spiraling pull that dragged frost and mist and loose ice inward toward his body. The pull deepened, and Lodin felt it through his Roots, felt the vast presence of Wandering Flame shudder and lean toward his brother like a mass of water moving toward a drain. Elder Wa closed his eyes. He placed both hands flat against the frozen ground, and his fingers sank into the ice as though it were warm mud.

The great frog's throat swelled and a low sound rose from deep in his chest, not a croak but a resonant vibration that Lodin felt in his teeth and his ribs and the soles of his feet. White light spread from the frog's hands. It moved through the ice in branching lines, thin as roots, and the pattern they traced reminded Lodin of the veins inside a leaf.

The lines forked and forked again and raced across the frozen surface toward the center of the lagoon, toward Lorn, and where they passed the ice turned from opaque white to something translucent and alive, as though the frozen water remembered what it had been before the cold came. The roots of white light reached Lorn's feet and climbed.

They crawled up his legs beneath the coat, and Lodin saw the glow through the fabric, thin bright lines that spread across his brother's body the way cracks spread through struck glass. Lorn's jaw clenched. His eyes darted to the holy qi climbing his legs. But his three mouths kept pulling, the vortex still spiraling. Then a tremor ran through his arms and his shoulders rolled forward as though something had seized him from the inside. Two forces had hold of his brother now. One pulling a god in.

The other burning the corruption out. Lodin's fists tightened until his knuckles popped.

"What do you need me to do," Lodin said.

"Keep everything off your brother and me." Elder Wa did not open his eyes. He was wreathed in a nimbus of ghostly white qi. The white roots he'd conjured continued to branch and spread beneath the ice, and the resonance in his chest deepened.

"Everything." Lodin turned toward the melee.

"Dae Han! Sarin!" Dae Han was thirty paces out on the ice, his jian held in both hands, the blade sheathed in a faint gold glow that left arcs of pale fire in the air when he cut. He moved through a knot of spectres that had flanked the Jade Nettle line, and each stroke dispersed the ghosts it touched. Sarin was closer, blood-blades extended, crows diving ahead of her as she carved through a spider that had broken past the Steel Serpent line.

She took its legs out from under it and her crows swarmed the torso before it hit the ice. Both of them looked up when he called. Sarin grinned, green eyes bright, and streaked toward him across the ice. Dae Han cut the last spectre in his path and followed. Sarin reached him first. She grabbed his wrist before he could speak, and the pull of her vampiric technique hit his blood like a hook set in a vein. Warmth rushed out of him through his skin, and the change was immediate. Color flooded her cheeks.

The blood-blades at her palms lengthened and brightened. Her crows screamed in exultation, a storm of wings that blotted the air above her head. She shivered, winked at him, and let go. Two of the hounds broke through the Steel Serpent line and came at them low and fast across the ice, bone claws scraping, filed teeth bared. A spider followed close behind, its eight hooked legs hammering the frozen surface.

Lodin drove his fist down through the first hound's skull and launched the second into the air with an uppercut. Sarin carved the spider apart at the legs and Dae Han put a talisman on the torso before it hit the ground. More came. They fought. But Lodin kept his eye on the far end of the lagoon. And for good reason, because the air above Lorn burst into flame.

A column of crimson fire punched down from the sky, and inside it a figure descended foot-first, one leg raised at the peak of an axe kick, the heel aimed at the crown of Lorn's skull. Demonic qi boiled off the striking leg in sheets of red flame that scorched the air black at the edges. It was a demon. Or a man so invested with demonic qi there was no effective difference. He had horns, tusks, deep purple skin stretched over a wiry frame.

The ragged robes and prayer beads he wore suggested he may once have been a monk. Lorn stood beneath him, shuddering in the grasp of Elder Wa's technique, arms raised, three mouths open, locked in the pull of his own profane technique drawing the soul of Wandering Flame inexorably closer. He could not move. This newcomer was about to hit him square.

"Go!" Sarin shouted.

"We have this!" Lodin shot across the ice. The distance vanished beneath his feet. He reached Lorn, planted himself above his brother, and caught the descending heel on his crossed forearms. The impact cratered the ice beneath him. His boots punched through the frozen surface and freezing water surged up around his shins. Crimson fire rolled across his guard and the heat seared the hair from his forearms. His bones sang with the force of it. The horned man landed on the broken ice in front of him.

Lean, scarred, bare feet steady on the fractured surface. Red eyes locked on Lodin's. The crimson fire pulled back to his fists and coiled there.

"Who dares stand between me and my prey," said the stranger. Lodin glared and raised his fists.