Before he could search the surrounding area, the bushes rustled on his right and another man burst from concealment. With a short thrust of a black-steel blade, the man attacked the Prince, almost eviscerating him on the spot.
But instinct and training took over, and instead of retreating the Prince stepped smartly inside the range of the sword, rendering the blow useless. He grabbed the man’s arm and delivered a lightning-fast flurry of blows to the soldier’s elbow, shoulder, and knee. There was a series of cracks, and the manlet out a gasp of surprise. He tried to swing his sword again, but his arm didn’t work properly anymore. The Prince redirected the poorly executed swipe, struck the man’s wrist with stiff fingers, and dropped to one knee to catch the sword as it fell from the useless hand. The Prince looked up and saw the man gazing down at him in panic. With only a second’s hesitation, he swung the blade upward and ended the man’s life.
The Prince felt that life add onto his own.
The Talisman etched into his chest and shoulders was named for the raven because it feasted on death, and when the Prince killed, it fed off the soul of the slain man or woman, augmenting the Prince’s life with theirs. His physical strength, his senses, his speed, all were doubled. But, equally doubled, was his sense of pain, his anger, his hate, and all the most powerful emotions and urges of the man he’d killed. In effect, he became two people in one body.
But worst of all, always worst of all, were the memories.
The details of the soldier’s life coursed through his mind as the sensations of a lifetime dug into his skin, both with enough force to almost send him reeling into madness. Images of a family flashed across his eyes, and a wife whom he loved very dearly. His dedication to the Empress had led him to volunteer for a mission with the Death Watch. He would be returning to her soon, and with the payment from this job they would buy the house on—
The sound of footsteps on hard rock, amplified now in the Prince’s ears, penetrated his split mind, and with a huge force of will he reasserted his true identity and blocked out the memories. His eyes opened, catching details too small for normal eyes to see, and he saw four men rushing toward him. With burgeoned strength pounding through his limbs, the Prince raised the dead man’s sword and stepped into the middle of the onrushing group.
He was a whirlwind of steel. In a matter of moments, the four men lay bleeding on the ground, alive, but quite unable to fight. The Prince stood there for a moment, breathing heavily, and tried to control his racing heart and thebloodlust that came from the dead soldier’s instincts. He looked up to see Tomaz and the Exile girl, who had now descended to fight beside the giant, under attack from both sides. He moved toward them.
A sound in the bushes to his right—so quiet he would have missed it but for his enhanced hearing. He whipped around to see a skeletal form dressed in black armor bearing cruel, twisted spikes at the shoulders, elbows, and knees, slink from concealment. It wore no helm, and the Prince looked into empty eye sockets, from the depths of which glowed not eyes but sickly green lights. A bare semblance of skin was stretched across the skull, showing the half-life nature of the creature. It opened its mouth in a smile, showing its withered tongue and gum-less teeth. Shivers chased themselves down the Prince’s back as he looked into the face of a nightmare.
“My Prince,” the Death Watchman rasped.
It drew a black onyx sword from a sheath at its hip, a sword that drank in the light around it like a thirsty demon, leaving it cloaked in an ever-shifting halo of shadows.
“You’ve been missed,” it said, and lunged.
The Prince dodged back a step, avoiding the sword. The Watchman lunged again with inhuman strength and speed, the onyx blade whistling and hissing through the air like a thing alive and thirsty for blood.
“Stop!” he cried. “I command you to stop!”
“I don’t take your commands anymore,” the skeletal mouth sneered at him. It let out a maniacal cackle that reverberated off the walls of the ravine.
The Prince felt a chill that had nothing to do with the fearful nature of the creature before him. Death Watchmen traded their souls to the clockwork Visigony for immortality, but in return they were sworn to obey the commands of the Empress and the Children, even if it meant surrendering the last bare shred of life that kept them anchored to the world. A Watchman couldn’t deny the command of one of the Children. It was impossible.
“You lie!” he screamed in its face. “I am one of the Children!”
The Death Watchman laughed again with terrifying glee and swung its black sword. The Prince retreated quickly, his enhanced strength and speed allowing him to fend off the attacks—for now. But the Watchmen worked in pairs, and if the second one came on him while he was fighting the first, he was doomed. He tried to reach out through his Talisman in order to locate the second Watchman, but the black onyx sword of the first flashed toward his throat and broke his concentration.
A length of curved steel shot past him, barely inches from his head, and buried itself in the Watchman’s left eye socket, eliciting a shocked scream of anger. There was a sizzling sound, and he watched, amazed, as the dagger burned the skin of the Watchman’s face. But, undaunted, the Watchman continued forward, raised its sword high overheard, and brought it down on the Prince’s blade, shattering it.
“MOVE!” roared a voice behind him.
Throwing away the broken blade, the Prince dove to the side, just in time to see Tomaz and the Exile girl hurtle past him.
The Death Watchman snarled as it pulled the Exile girl’s dagger from its eye, even as the blade made the flesh on its hand sizzle and smoke. The Exiles attacked, engaging it in a flurry of blows.
The Prince reached back through the Talisman, searching for the second Watchman. He turned around in a quick circle, searching for the sickly half-dead glow, but it was nowhere to be found.
That’s impossible.I just felt it a moment ago, where is it?
He strained his mind and his eyes, concentrating harder, searching for that tiny wavering point of life, but just as he felt he was about to reach it, the first Watchman broke free and ran straight for him. Again reacting on instinct, he stepped forward inside the range of the blow intended to cleave him in two and returned the attack, kicking out a foot to swipe its legs from under it. But theWatchman moved aside with the speed of a striking snake and brought its onyx blade around in a chopping motioning intended to behead him.
The Exile girl was there waiting, and she dug her second dagger into the base of the thing’s neck, sending the blow awry. The Prince noted mentally that she was well informed—the only way to kill a Watchman was to sever the brain from the body.
But her dagger missed the creature’s spine, and the Watchman threw her off and turned once more to the Prince. It feinted to the left, to the right, and then out of nowhere a heavily booted foot appeared and smashed into the Prince’s chest, knocking him on his back and forcing the breath from his lungs.
He rolled to the side as his vision narrowed; stars winked in front of his eyes and his body cried out for air. The Watchman’s blade snaked out once more, and with a hair-raising screech dug into the rock not an inch from the Prince’s head. The skeletal face of the monster split into a smile of ghastly glee as it raised its sword once more. The Prince had nowhere to run.
A flash of silver-and-blue steel.
The Death Watchman’s face turned to confusion as its sword dropped from its hands, and then it crumpled slowly to the ground, where its head rolled loose from its body. A bare second later, both head and body began to decompose, generating a horrific stench.
