80
~ JOSLYN ~
Joslyn raced through the doorway, charging the solitary figure who stood by the floor-to-ceiling window set into the throne room’s western wall. He stood with his hands behind his back, shoulders slightly stooped, gazing through the window like a man without a care in the world.
He turned when Joslyn and Tasia had crossed half the distance between the door and the window, casually lifting one hand and making a flicking gesture.
Joslyn flew backwards, careening into Tasia behind her. Tasia let out a soft grunt as they both fell to the polished marble floor, a tangle of limbs. Somehow, Joslyn managed to keep hold of the sword.
Even as the deathless king turned to face them, making a tsk-tsk noise like a mother trying to decide whether to be amused or annoyed at her mischievous children, Joslyn was already on her feet again, pulling Tasia up behind her.
“So,” the king said, “a coordinated attack? Clever. And admittedly beyond what I thought you were capable of, Joslyn.”
Joslyn was confused – and not just by “a coordinated attack.” Where she had expected an elderly, frail man, she saw instead a man in his late middle years. His hair was steely grey, the color of a sword cast in shadow, but there were hints that it was once black. And although his shoulders curved forward ever-so-slightly, he was well-muscled and fit. In his soft leather riding boots, snug trousers, and cream-colored tunic with a leather vest hanging open over it, the deathless king looked like a noble recently returned from a fox hunting trip.
The double doors in the southern wall swung open, and two Order of Targhan assassins rushed into the room. One of them pulled a blowgun from her black cloak, taking aim at Joslyn.
The deathless king held up a hand. “No need for that, Treecia,” he said pleasantly. “In fact, I think it better if you both resume your posts outside the door. My business with the false Empress and her consort should be over relatively swiftly.”
Joslyn bristled, though she wasn’t sure which she took more offense to – Tasia being called “false” or herself being reduced to the position of “consort.”
The woman with the blowgun out – Treecia – nodded deferentially to her king and put the blowgun back inside her cloak. The woman beside her sheathed her rapier. Then both of them, without taking their eyes off Joslyn and Tasia, backed slowly from the room.
The moment the double doors closed behind them, Joslyn shifted her weight, prepared to charge again.
No,said Tasia. Except she didn’t say it out-loud. Her voice was somehow inside Joslyn’s head. You always taught me to search for a way to take the advantage back when fighting an opponent.Let him talk. Let him think he has us cornered and afraid. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what I’m capable of, and we should keep it that way while we can.
All right,Joslyn thought, but she wasn’t sure if Tasia could hear her.
Joslyn didn’t know if she had any idea of what Tasia was capable of, either, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
“I knew you were a powerful dreamwalker,” the deathless king said, walking away from the window and towards the ostentatious throne centered between two colorful tapestries on the room’s rear wall. “But honestly, I had no idea that you had the energy to both keep me at bay and guide your underlings through the city at the same time. It’s impressive, really.”
Guide underlings through the city? What was this madman talking about?
As if Tasia had heard Joslyn’s bewilderment, she said into her mind, Just keep him talking. It will take me a few minutes to prepare.
The king settled into his throne, leaning back as languidly as a lion at rest, surveying his pride. Joslyn realized with a small shock it was the same throne she’d seen him in many times before, in her dreams. She almost hadn’t recognized it, because in her dreams, the throne and the room it sat within were dusty with disuse, filled with cobwebs and smelling of a crypt. Now, everything was clean, bright, the room illuminated by a fire roaring in a large hearth to Joslyn’s right. This was the southern drawing room she was used to seeing in the palace, not the ominous ruin she knew from her dreams.
The king resumed speaking. “Of course, your abilities only reinforce, to my mind, why you should join me rather than fight me.” He let out a short laugh. “Why, together, the three of us truly could rule the world. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“I have no interest in ruling the world,” Joslyn growled. “Ambitions like that are for madmen like you.”
“Yes, yes, I’m the mad one,” he said, rolling his eyes. “What I hope you’ve realized by now, though, is that there are ultimately two ways to be possessed by shadows. There are the possessions you have witnessed here and in Port Lorsin, in which the possessed resist the shadows within them and find their souls relegated to the Shadowlands in the process – ironic, given that those souls eventually transform into shadows themselves – and then there are those like me and my Order of Targhan, who accept a holy union with the shadow inside them and become … something far greater than an ordinary human being could ever dream of being.” He held up his hands, lacing his fingers together to represent the union. “This is how it should be. How it always was, in fact, before the Brotherhood forcibly separated humankind from shadowkind and created the wretched world of the Shadowlands. There is no madness in what I am or what I have created; I am simply righting that wrong. That is all I have ever wanted to do. And yet others call me ‘mad’ for it, and steal my birthright from me.”
As subtly as she could, Joslyn glanced in Tasia’s direction. Tasia’s eyes still faced forward, but they were … empty, somehow. As though she had shrunk in upon herself. As though there was no real Tasia within her body.
Oh my love,Joslyn thought, I hope you know what you’re doing.
“What ‘birthright’?” Joslyn asked aloud, taking care to make the question sound as impudent as possible. Tasia wanted Joslyn to goad him into talking, so she would do her best. “All I see before me is a mad, preening sorcerer pretending to be a king.”
The deathless king snorted. “Don’t you understand? I am the last living blood descendant of King Dorsan I, which makes me your rightful Emperor. Your so-called Empress has no more claim to the throne than a pauper of Arun’s Quarter. I am the one who was exiled from my home, pushed from the lands my ancestors worked so hard to settle; I was the one who was wronged. You should be bending a knee to me, not to this commoner pretender.” He gestured angrily at Tasia, who still seemed to stare at him in contemplative silence.
Joslyn didn’t want to give him the chance to wonder why Tasia wasn’t answering, so she spoke again to keep his attention on her. “Nonsense. Tasia is no commoner. The lineage of the House of Dorsa has remained unbroken for a thousand years. Your accusation that she is a false Empress is baseless and you know it.”
“It will be baseless,” said the king. He was definitely no longer amused; Joslyn’s skin prickled, body warning her that the lion at rest before her was about to bare his teeth and spring. “It will be baseless the moment she becomes my queen. Otherwise, she is just the latest pretender in a line of pretenders stretching back eight hundred years.”
“We have had enough of you. Of both of you.” The words came from Tasia, but the voice did not belong to her. It was booming, deep, grating. And it was as much a wave of energy as a voice – the force of it made the glass in the window vibrate precariously; the doors rattled in their frames; the tapestries billowed as though a great wind had blown through the room.
Joslyn might have taken the time to be startled, but the two Order of Targhan guards stationed outside the double doors rushed back inside as Tasia’s vibrated through the room.
Joslyn was on them before the doors even finished opening, slicing the wrist of one before she could reach into her cloak for her blowgun, then spinning with thorn on vine to thrust her sword into the belly of the other. They both shriveled into old women before Joslyn’s eyes, then burst into dust.
“You,”the deathless king said venomously, completely ignoring his two dead guards and focusing solely on Tasia.
He rose from the throne, poised for an attack but keeping back. Gods – was he afraid of Tasia? But then Joslyn’s blood went cold.
No. The king was afraid of the shadow inside Tasia. Even as she thought it, Joslyn saw Tasia’s irises transform into flames.
“I should have known you’d show up,” the king said. “In an inferior vessel like that one, no less.”
“Inferior?” The hair-raising voice that came from Tasia but was not hers laughed mockingly. “Yet you planned to inhabit her yourself, by the end of this very night.”
“That body is a tool I need.”
“Wrong. This body is the one I will use to finally destroy you.”
The deathless king and Tasia flew at one another. Literally flew. They launched from the marble floor at the same time, shooting into the air like circus performers without the aid of harnesses. When they collided mid-air, some ten feet above Joslyn’s head, the throne room shook as though struck by an earthquake. Furniture tumbled over; candelabras clattered to the floor; tapestries fell from their hooks on the wall. The marble floor undulated like an ocean wave, and even Joslyn lost her footing.
She stumbled and fell sideways, right hip and wrist striking the rolling floor first. Ku-sai’s sword tumbled from her grasp, skittering across the room. She scrambled after it on all fours.
Not the sword, I cannot lose the sword,Joslyn thought desperately. Her sister had told her everything depended upon the union of that sword and Tasia’s crown. Joslyn hadn’t been entirely sure she believed Tasmyn at the time, but first Rennus and later the deathless king had spent the past ten years pursuing her relentlessly through the Shadowlands trying to wrest it from her possession. If what was happening now had any chance of success, Joslyn needed that sword, she was sure of it.
She reached the sword just as the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of the room shattered one after the other, spraying glass across the room like a hail of knives. Joslyn turned away hastily, covering her face and head just in time. Shards rained against her body, then tinkled to the floor.
The floor that wasn’t moving any longer. Joslyn snatched up the sword and scrambled to her feet, spinning to face the deathless king.
Except the deathless king wasn’t in the room any longer. Neither was Tasia.
“Tasia!”Joslyn shouted, not caring that she might bring more guards into the room. What was the Order of Targhan to her now, after spending ten years fighting the Shadowlands’ demons?
No one answered Joslyn’s call, not Tasia, not the deathless king, not the Order of Targhan.
Where were they? Joslyn burst through the double doors at the southern end of the room, into a grand corridor that she knew led to the palace’s southern entrance.
She scanned the corridor, searching for Tasia, for the king, for guards or open doors or any sign at all that someone had been here recently. But there was no one, nothing; the great hallway, the original entrance into the palace designed to impress nobles and commoners alike of the great power of the House of Dorsa, was as empty and silent as a tomb.
“Tasia!”
The burning knot in Joslyn’s stomach told her Tasia and the deathless king had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere she couldn’t – or didn’t want to – follow: back into the Shadowlands.
Joslyn ground her teeth, contemplating what to do next. If they had carried their battle into the Shadowlands, the only way for her to reach them was through dreamwalking. But now that the fight against the king had begun, surely reinforcements from the Order of Targhan would be arriving at the palace to assist him, and if Joslyn was sleeping, her body would be vulnerable to an attack.
She paused, cocking her head. Distantly, through the gaping holes left by the shattered windows in the throne room’s western wall, Joslyn could still hear the clashing of swords and shouts of battle cries in a foreign tongue. She frowned. What – who – could possibly be fighting a stone’s throw from the palace? It wasn’t Tasia and the deathless king. She stepped closer to the open window, extending her hearing towards the sounds of battle.
Before she could interpret exactly what the battle might mean, a much louder sound – a deafening CRACK! like a lightning strike – came from right behind her.
Joslyn spun around, the battle outside forgotten. Two entangled figures fell to the marble floor, which began to vibrate as though shaken by a god’s hand from below. Joslyn raced towards them, realizing one had managed to pin the other to the floor. Both glowed with hazy, otherworldly light, so thick that Joslyn couldn’t tell for sure that they were indeed Tasia and the deathless king until she was mere feet away from them.
Tasia was the one on top. The king writhed below her, but both of her hands stayed wrapped firmly around his throat.
“Now, Joslyn!” Tasia said – this time not in that strange booming voice that didn’t belong to her, but in her own.
Joslyn didn’t hesitate. She plunged Ku-sai’s sword into the king’s chest. His eyes and mouth instantly went wide with shock. A curl of smoke escaped from where the blade impaled him, and within the time it took to draw a breath, he transformed from the middle-aged man with steel-colored hair back into the frail, ancient creature from Joslyn’s dreams. In another breath, he would be dust, and Joslyn’s long, long nightmare would finally be over.
But then the direction of the smoke reversed, flowing back into the place where the sword protruded from his chest. Hair that had been snow white and wispy a moment earlier now darkened, thickened. Withered, nearly translucent skin grew firmer. Black eyes flicked in Tasia’s direction, and she flew off the king’s chest as though kicked by a bull. Then the deathless king wrapped both hands around Ku-sai’s sword. Blood flowed freely from his palms.
The entire transformation – the smoke, the aging, then the gripping of the sword, the growing younger again, the smoke flowing back into his body as he bucked Tasia off – occurred in barely a second, perhaps two. But Joslyn still held the sword’s hilt, and even as the deathless king tried to pull it from his chest, she pressed down.
The blade rose an inch. Then another.
No,was all Joslyn could think. No, the sword was supposed to work. This has to end!
“It will take… more than… a sword to… kill … a deathless king!”