Skul Drek rolled his shoulders, readying to strike. The way he fought wasn’t natural. There wasn’t a clash of steel against steel. When Skul Drek struck, it was more like he attacked something else, something beneath the flesh of the Berserkir.
The Berserkir snarled when the assassin slashed another ribbon of darkness across his body, forcing the warrior to a halt. A rabid bear in a trap.
Skul Drek whirled around and waved one hand. He didn’t shout. There was no scrape of his raspy, heavy voice in my head.
I blinked and spun toward the boy. “Run, Krisjan.” I could see the rooftop of his longhouse. “Go! Do not look back.”
He obeyed. Head down, the boy darted down the street, never once looking at the phantom who’d become a defender.
I took the bone dagger from my chamber in hand and watched as shadows clashed with a Stav blade. The Berserkirs were unstoppable. Iron and steel from blades could wound them, but rarely kill. But the lashes from Skul Drek’s mesmerizing darkness landed the warrior on his knees, yet I could not see a drop of blood.
Coils of dark tethers strangled the warrior’s thick neck. Positioned behind the Berserkir, Skul Drek moved his fiery eyes to find me.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t tell me to run. Heat flushed through my blood, and my heart quickened.
“Are you speaking to me?”
His skin was cold slate, but when his lips curled his sharp teeth gleamed against the darkness surrounding his head.
All at once, my body careened forward. Frosted wind pummeled my cheeks the same as in my bedchamber. Salt and smoke filled my lungs with each breath. Longhouses, sod rooftops, and cobbled roads were mirrored in dripping darkness.
Once again, he’d pulled me—perhaps my soul—into the mirrored space.
“Leave.” Skul Drek’s strained voice shattered my stun.
His darkness remained, but was now wrapped around a collision of different shades of gold. Here, the Berserkir’s glowing body was made of different shapes and angles. I could plainly see every different shade of each soul bone.
He was a thick slab of armor. From the bulging shards acrosshis skull, the ridges of his cheeks, his jaw, to a manipulated breastplate that shielded his heart and ribs. The warrior was hardly himself at all.
“He has locked on the boy and on me. The lust for blood will hunt us.”
“I will keep him,” Skul Drek snapped.
“But you…you cannot kill him, can you?” I could make out the lashes across the bones, doubtless made by the shadows. They acted like knives against the trapped souls in the bones. But none reached the Berserkir’s heart, his lungs, or his true skull.
I held my palms in front of me. The roar of the magic burned in my chest, the taste of ice and salt and smoke settled on my tongue.
“There is no time,” Skul Drek warned, as though he already knew what I was considering.
I ignored him and pressed both palms against a thick, jagged shard of a soul bone melded to the Berserkir’s ribs.
Through Tomas’s unwarranted mercy, I knew to unravel melded bone ached and burned on my own body. Dozens of stinging jabs prickled along my skin until the bone shifted under the Berserkir’s skin.
Narrow threads that had been fastened in place over the soul bones were still there, stitched by another melder’s craft. Like a hem on a skirt, I tugged on the threads, unstitching each one.
Skul Drek grunted when the Berserkir’s bright form shifted. He was fighting back.
“I can make him vulnerable.”
The assassin snapped his teeth again. “You wish for pain.”
“I know it is painful, but he is lost to the violence of corrupt bones. They are so armored we cannot even take his head. Tell me another way to kill him, or do you plan to battle him until the gods intervene?”
Skul Drek looked behind him into the nothingness. “Make haste.”
I returned my palms to the gilded stitches across a soul bone shielding the Berserkir’s neck. One by one, I unlaced the old melding. The bone snapped free and the warrior’s form jerked. Skul Drek tightened his shadows, holding the man in place.
I cried out, doubling over when the agony of unbreaking craft burned in my stomach.
