Heart of Black Ice

CHAPTER 37

Light sizzled around General Utros, a crackling web that swallowed him and tore him away from Orogang, the fighting soldiers, the wailing Ruva and her dead sister. His body went numb, completely blinded.

Buffeted, weightless, tumbling in a void. He screamed, his skull twisted like the lid of a jar, and his thoughts howled, detached. His bones elongated, tangled, flailed like limp ribbons. The air, the world—existence itself—folded around him, then refolded, and he could hear a scream outside him and within, wrapping around his thoughts.

Ruva had caused this—he knew it. The sorceress had released some extreme form of magic to save them, but it had plunged him here. The light around Utros flared brighter until it became a wall of molten pain that hung and then shattered.

The world unfolded again, and he spilled out.

Reality crystallized in front of him, a landscape of mountains and sky. He staggered forward two steps, then his legs simply could not support him anymore. Utros crumpled to his knees, sprawled forward, and caught himself with splayed hands. He couldn’t breathe. His chest had been squeezed as if under an impossible weight of rocks.

Nearby, Ruva appeared in a slash of lightning-intense glare. She clung to the corpse of her twin sister. Smoke and the stench of burned flesh wafted up from the blackened crater in the middle of Ava’s chest.

Disoriented, Utros looked up. His gold half mask had slid down his face to cover one of his eyes, and he adjusted it so he could see. The horned helmet tumbled onto the ground beside him, clattering among the stones and patchy alpine tundra. In front of him he saw countless armored figures, an encamped army. Having seen the flash of light from Ruva’s spell, they turned to him and suddenly recognized their commander.

“General!” one man cried. “General Utros has returned!”

He sucked in a deep breath of biting air. He glanced around, noted the mountain peaks, and realized that his huge army had already crossed the highest mountains and was marching down the western side of the range.

This didn’t make sense. “But we were in Orogang. How did we get here?” He turned to the grieving sorceress, whose arms were still wrapped around the limp body of her twin. “What did you do?”

Ruva made inhuman sounds of sorrow. Her sister’s pale arms dangled, her fingers curled in death. Ruva rocked her back and forth, rubbed the markings of soot and dried blood into a muddy smear of sadness. Utros shook her shoulders with both compassion and command. “Ruva, tell me what happened! How did we get here?” They had to be many hundreds of miles from Orogang.

The sorceress let Ava’s corpse drape across her lap. The dead woman’s eyes were merely blackened sockets. Nicci’s surge of combined Additive and Subtractive lightning had raged through Ava’s heart and blasted out of her eyes.

The nearby soldiers rushed closer. As word was passed, lieutenants came running, and he recognized First Commander Enoch. Utros had only a few moments to get answers from the sorceress. Utros shook her again. “What did you do to us? You left a thousand soldiers in Orogang in the middle of a battle. Speak quickly!”

A growl of vengeful fury boiled in Ruva’s throat. “I couldn’t leave you there to die, beloved Utros. Nicci killed my sister. I had to get us away from there, had to save you. Ava…”

“But how? How long have you known how to travel like this?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t think it would work, but I had no choice. A long time ago, Ava and I learned of a dangerous distance-eating spell that would erase all the miles between one point and another. I knew many anchors here among the soldiers, their keepsakes, even the sword and tack worn by First Commander Enoch. I pulled us here, though I thought we might die in transit.” Tears smeared the paint she had marked on her face. “I did it for you. My sister was dead, and I had to save you.”

He felt a pang of sympathy for Ruva. As twins, their bodies fused at birth, the two had shared an immeasurably intimate connection, their gift entangled, their thoughts practically identical. Even though they had been cut apart, Ava and Ruva were inextricable. And now one of them was dead.

“I am sorry for you.” He knew the horrible pain of losing his beloved Majel, but this must be far worse. “You have always been loyal. I never questioned your service. You and your sister were the best among us, the finest.”

“I’m sorry I left the army behind,” Ruva said. “Those soldiers are without a commander in an empty city.”

Utros tried to console her. “They are a thousand of my best soldiers. If they can’t wipe out a handful of refugees living in the shadows, then they do not deserve to be part of my army.” He smiled gently with half of his face. “In effect, I now have a strong military contingent in Orogang, and once my soldiers have flushed out the vermin, they can reclaim the capital in my name. It is an accidental victory.” He stroked her cheek, used the moisture from a fallen tear to smudge the paint in a straight line. “We just inadvertently placed the first occupation force to rebuild the empire.”

The sorceress’s expression softened. “I cannot take us back there. The distance spell was dangerous. I nearly lost us in the void, and then we would never have returned. I even used some of Ava’s gift as her spirit dwindled.”

Utros lifted Ruva to her feet. Her dead twin lay on the tundra grasses. “I don’t wish to go back to Orogang. I am here where I belong, with my army. I have to lead them across the Old World.”

First Commander Enoch rushed up to them, his expression a mixture of relief and unanswered questions. He dropped to his knee, pressed a fist to his heart, and bowed before his general. “You are here! How is it possible?” He looked in horror at Ava’s corpse. “What happened, sir?”

“I am back. That’s what matters,” Utros said.

Other subcommanders and curious soldiers rushed up, eager to hear the story. They dropped to their knees. Utros raised Enoch to his feet. “Report, First Commander. Tell me what happened while I was away.”

Enoch briefly looked aside, nervous and distressed, then steeled himself to report. “Your army has crossed the mountain pass of Kol Adair, sir, and we are descending to the foothills. The soldiers keep marching, but they are very hungry. Even with the spell.”

“They will survive.” Utros looked at Ruva, and the sorceress gave a brusque nod.

“But we have suffered many losses while you were gone, General.” Enoch hesitated, then explained about the field of poison flowers and then the high mountain lake where so many troops had been lured into the water by their dead loved ones.

“Keeper and spirits,” Utros whispered.

“I do not blame them, sir,” Enoch said. “I felt it too. I saw my Camille, our two sons, even my father. I barely broke away myself. We lost more than a thousand fighters before I pulled the army away.”

Utros absorbed another blow to the countless soldiers who had followed him under Iron Fang’s banner.

Enoch continued. “The Keeper wants us, sir. He knows we’ve avoided him for fifteen centuries, and now we are marked, more than a hundred thousand souls. We all should have gone to the underworld long ago. They are effectively dead, but still marching.”

Utros felt a flare of anger. “The Keeper can’t have us yet. I need my army, and we still have a war to win.”

Wrestling with grief while also stoking the fires of revenge, Ruva washed the body of her sister and used a razor-sharp knife to shave any hint of hair from her cold body, not a strand left behind.

Ruva applied herself with reverence to this last task for her sister. She placed small round stones in Ava’s burned eye sockets, and wrapped boiled white cloth around her sister’s breasts to cover the black hole where her heart had been. When Ava was clean and pure again, Ruva made fresh pots of paint, blood red and pitch black, and painted new designs across the pale flesh, then reproduced the symbols across her own body.

When Ruva proclaimed that she and her sister were ready, General Utros commanded two of his soldiers to carry the bier and place it carefully atop an unlit pile of wood that would serve as a funeral pyre. Except for the white wrapping across the burned hole in her chest, the slender woman lay naked on the kindling.

Letting his arms hang at his sides, Utros turned to Ruva. “You are my sorceress now. I trust you to be strong.”

“I cannot be as strong without my sister,” Ruva said. “But I would do anything for you.”

“As would we all, General,” said First Commander Enoch.

His soldiers raised their voices in a shout of affirmation. Utros absorbed it all, and when the cheers fell silent, he called for torches to light the pyre. The dead willows caught fire quickly, and the flames grew to an intense blaze.

“The Keeper will have to be satisfied with Ava for now,” Utros shouted to his army, “for the rest of you are needed here!”

The pyre roared so bright and hot that Utros had to step back. Transfixed, Ruva stayed close to the blaze as the fires blackened her twin’s flesh and destroyed the painted markings. Ava’s skin cracked as the fire consumed her. Her face fell away, leaving only a skull with two pebbles inside the eye sockets. Though the intense heat reddened Ruva’s own skin, she refused to retreat. Utros grasped her arm and pulled her away, pressing the slender woman’s shoulders against his chest armor.

As the orange fire devoured the remnants of Ava’s body, the pyre shifted and the flames swirled as if a whirlwind had caught the embers in a circle. The color changed from a bright yellow to a sickly green as Ava’s bones fell apart into the core of the fire. A translucent green image rose from the flames, insubstantial and shimmering.

The soldiers gasped in superstitious terror. Ruva let out a low moan that sounded like surprise, not fear. The apparition sharpened, became more intense, and Utros recognized the dead sorceress.

“Ava, you aren’t in the underworld!” Ruva cried.

“I cannot go.” Ava’s spectral form brightened to stand out against the bonfire, where her blackened bones crumbled into the embers.

Utros held on to Ruva with his powerful arms, although she struggled to break free and throw herself into the flames. He needed to know Ava’s purpose. “Has your spirit decided to remain with us? Did the Keeper allow it?”

“My sister and I are twins,” said Ava’s shimmering form. “We are bound together, heart and mind and soul. We share the same Han. The Keeper marked both of us. As infants, after our bodies were cut apart, we two died briefly and traveled through the veil, but a healer brought us back to life and snatched our souls from the underworld. The Keeper knows us. He is waiting for us … but he needs both of us.” The shimmering spirit hovered before Ruva. “My sister must pass through the veil with me. I cannot go alone.”

Ruva looked longingly at her twin, but pressed her shoulders back hard against the general’s chest. “No, I must remain here. You know it.”

Ava laughed. “And therefore, I must remain! You are an anchor that keeps my spirit here in this world. I am trapped between life and death.” The greenish spirit flitted directly through First Commander Enoch, shocking him, and then she circled the soldiers, who scattered in panic. She wafted back through the fire, entirely unharmed. “I am a spirit unfettered by physical form. I can go wherever I wish, see whatever I like.”

She swooped closer to Utros. He was not afraid, but intrigued. Her spectral face was very close to his as she hovered before him. “And then I can report back here.” She smiled. “Beloved Utros, I will be your perfect spy!”