Death would have been quick for Veryon, if the Traitor had aimed at all truly.
Olvir couldn’t yet remember that moment. The blank patch in his memory was a fair-sized blessing, one that let him keep going until he and Vivian were only a few feet away from the knife.
Then he stopped and turned to her. “You should stay here.”
In the moment of light, he saw Vivian make the same calculations he had: how quickly she could cross the ground, how much longer the distance would give her to react. Behind that, he saw all that neither of them had time to say. It blazed forth at him, so blatant that speech wasn’t necessary.
“All right. Gods—” she began and then stopped, rigid, cocking her head to stare upward. “Do you hear that?”
Darkness descended. Vivian’s hands did, too, grabbing Olvir and yanking him sideways. The air itself screamed above them, a rending shriek that actually sounded pained.
He knew that noise from Oakford. It had come with dark fire, worse than the spells the Twisted mage had used.
In the silence after it ended, Olvir heard the flapping of gigantic wings.
Chapter 39
Tactics took over. Vivian and Olvir scrambled up from the mirrored ground and bolted apart, drawing weapons. Out in the darkness, the new arrival—surely not who’d first come to Olvir’s mind when he heard the spell distort the air over his head, please, gods, no—landed with a thud.
Light flashed, illuminating the form that was gathering itself. Wide wings grew from the being’s shoulders and spread out, tattered in some places and blotchy with tumorous flesh in others. They cast strange shadows on the mirrors, in the light that came from every direction and none. Olvir couldn’t see the figure’s face at first.
He didn’t need to. The gray-and-orange silk robe gave a lot away. So did the gems that glinted from the shadows around the person’s head and glared from one of their hands. The sight of the other hand alone would have let Olvir recognize its owner, though. It was spatulate and skinless, girdled by three metal circles with a blackened jewel at the center of each.
Thyran had arrived.
His countenance, revealed when he folded his wings, was as horrible as Olvir remembered from the final moment of their last encounter. A bone crown had fused to Thyran’s head, melting over one eye, and the cheek below that had vanished. So had his lips. He hadn’t grown wings when Olvir had last seen him, but it wasn’t surprising that he’d had the will to reconfigure his own form. His remaining pale-blue eye stared at Olvir with all the fury that had led the man to murder, then conquest, and finally apocalypse.
Power danced in the scorched jewels. Olvir had seen it before. He’d survived it once, with the help of a whole circle of other people. Those companions were far away now.
Maybe he could dodge a strike or two. Maybe Tinival could shield him again, even against Gizath’s high priest and in the middle of the Battlefield, where the Traitor had changed the world itself.
He doubted it.
Olvir set his sights on the warlord’s wings, coiled his body for the charge—and Vivian was at his side, in a burst of speed that clearly startled even Thyran.
She didn’t really pause, any more than the wind paused when it ruffled the leaves on a tree. Olvir heard her whisper in his ear, almost silent and all the more emphatic for it, before she was gone.
“Get the knife,” she told him.
Then she hurled herself at Thyran.
Love, honor, and every impulse of the power within him all shrieked at Olvir to follow the dark armored shape that hurtled across the mirrors, to protect Vivian with his life or at least to ensure that she wouldn’t die alone.
He dropped his sword and ran for the knife instead.
* * *
Vivian dashed forward at nearly her top speed, two or three times as fast as a normal mortal, and lunged with almost all her weight behind the blow. Her aim was clear and true, her arm straight: she would’ve run any other enemy through.
This was Thyran.
When Ulamir barely pricked his chest before hitting a thick, clinging mass of flesh, Vivian was ready. The fraction of force she’d held back became the lever she needed to turn herself around, putting all the thwarted energy of her blow into a backward roll over one shoulder. She held Ulamir close to her body, she saw one of the half-molten jewels in Thyran’s crown flicker—
The edge of the warding spell, expanding in a corona close to the warlord’s body, clipped her. She went sprawling on her face, barely managing not to land on Ulamir.
One of her own eyes stared back at her from the mirror-ground. Then darkness surrounded them again.
Thyran’s breathing was loud, distorted as it rasped through his half-melted nose and mouth. His steps were louder. Vivian’s would be, too, she realized. She couldn’t hear Olvir’s any longer. She hoped that meant he’d reached the damned knife.
