Held it aloft in the light from the torches. Filled his lungs, and screamed.

“Stand! Stand your fucking ground! They fall down just like men! Stand with me! STAND!”

For a moment, everything seemed to stop. Even the dwenda appeared to pause in their onslaught. The torchlight gleamed hot yellow off the black curve of the Aldrain helmet. Blood ran down his hand and wrist.

Somewhere, someone human cheered long and low, and the others took it up.

It became a roar.

A dwenda came howling across the street at him, blade raised. Ringil swung the helmet and hurled it at his attacker, ran in behind.

Somehow, as he leapt in to meet the dwenda, he already knew it was Seethlaw.

The rest was a nightmare blur of blood and steel and speed. Seethlaw was fast, as fast as Ringil remembered from Terip Hale’s courtyard, maybe faster, and now he was no longer constrained by whatever had stopped him from killing Ringil the first time around. He whirled and leapt, slashed in and out as if the long-sword were no weightier than some courtier’s blade-for-show. He had no shield to slow him down, and he was clearly—Ringil could feel it coming off the black-clad figure in waves—raving with hate.

A dark lord will rise.

Ringil gave himself over to the krinzanz, and the memory of a young woman’s living head, mounted on a tree stump, weeping silent, swamp-water tears.

It was really all he had left.

“Come on motherfucker,” he heard himself screaming, almost continuously. “Come on.”

Seethlaw ripped open his face along the jaw, the gouging point of a thrust Ringil couldn’t get his head away from fast enough. Seethlaw stabbed him through a gap in the ill-assorted pieces of plate on his right arm. Seethlaw slashed him across the top of one thigh. Scorched his neck where it emerged from the cuirass, smashed apart an already damaged section of armor on his right shoulder and ripped the flesh beneath. Seethlaw—

To Ringil, it felt like nothing. Like nothing at all.

He waded through the pain. He grinned.

And later, much later, one of the surviving Throne Eternal men would swear he saw a flickering blue light spark along Ringil’s limbs in the dark.

Seethlaw struck down at his wavering shield. The blow ran a long split into the battered metal and the wooden backing, ruined it for the next blow.

But the blade stuck.

Ringil let go the straps. Seethlaw tried to withdraw, the weight of the shield dragged his sword down. Ringil leapt in, swung, yelled, hacked savagely down.

The Ravensfriend found the dwenda’s shoulder, and bit deep.

Seethlaw howled. Still could not free his sword. Ringil sobbed, drew breath, hacked down again with both hands. The arm went dead, hung half severed. Seethlaw fell to his knees with the shock.

Once again, everything seemed to stop.

The dwenda reached up, let go his useless sword, and tugged at the helmet. Ringil, in sudden, numb suspension, let him do it. The helmet came off, gave him Seethlaw’s beautiful dwenda face for the last time, contorted with pain and rage. He glared up at Ringil. His teeth gritted.

“What,” he spat, in panting Naomic, “have you done? Gil, we—we had—”

Ringil stared bleakly down at him.

“I’ve had better than you drunk in a Yhelteth back alley,” he said coldly, and chopped Seethlaw’s head and face open with the Ravens-friend.

Withdrew the blade, brandished it high and screamed.

A dark lord will rise.

Yeah, right.

Then he set his boot on the dying dwenda’s chest and shoved him aside. He took two suddenly shaky steps down into the street and what remained of the battle. The roar of the remaining men went on, the dwenda looked to be falling back. Ringil blinked to clear vision which had suddenly, unaccountably gone blurred. He stared around him.

“Who’s fucking next?” he screamed.

And crumpled bleeding into the mud.

CHAPTER 33

The road northwest out of Pranderghal rose into the hills on slow, looping hairpin turns, fading finally to a thin, pale gray line as it disappeared over the saddle between two peaks. On a day with clear weather—like today—you could see riders coming for a good two or three hours before they hit town.

Or you could watch a couple of them riding away.

Archeth and Egar sat out drinking tankards of ale in the garden of the Swamp Dog Inn, still slightly disbelieving that the warmth and good weather could hold up this long. There was a sporadic, ruffling breeze out of the north that robbed the sun of some of its comfort whenever it gusted, but it was tough to see how that would have justified complaint. Mostly, they were both just glad to be alive when so many others they knew were not. It was, Egar supposed, much the same feeling Marnak had talked about—you start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you’re still standing when the field is clogged with other men’s blood and corpses. Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you—but mellowed into a slightly numb bliss beyond caring, beyond worrying much about the why.

“Swamp dog,” said Archeth, tapping idly at the raised emblem on her tankard. It was a crude miniature copy of the painted sign that hung on the street side of the inn, and showed a monstrous-looking hound, up to its belly in swamp water with a dead snake in its jaws and a spiked collar around its neck. “Always wondered about that. First thing Elith said to me—get between a swamp dog and its dinner, I had no idea what she meant.”

Egar snorted. “Seems pretty fucking obvious to me.”

“Yeah, but you were out here working scavenger crews for months, working with swamp dogs day in, day out probably.”

“Working a month before you showed up, a single month, and that was only because Takavach told me I had to. Not like I exactly took to the trade. Anyway.” He spread his hands, gestured at her tankard. “Swamp. Dog. Got a sort of self-evident ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Ah, fuck you then.”

“Yeah, you keep promising, I keep waiting.”

She kicked him under the trestle. But her grin smeared away almost immediately, and she grew serious again.

“This Takavach. You say he wore a leather cloak and a brimmed hat.”

“Yeah. Always does, it’s in all the stories. He’s from, uhm.” Egar frowned, groping for a decent translation from the Majak. “ ‘All the places the ocean will always be heard.’ Something like that. Cavorts with mermaids in the surf and so forth. Cloak and hat’s like a symbol for it; it’s like a northern ship captain’s rig.” Egar propped himself up a little in his seat and peered at her. “Why?”

Archeth shook her head. “Forget it.”

“C’mon. Why?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Just, the day Idrashan got better, got back on his feet again, one of the stable boys swore to me he’d walked in on some guy in a hat and cloak like that. Apparently, he was leaning over the rail of Idrashan’s stall and talking to him in some weird foreign language. And I remember now, there was some talk of the same figure walking the streets at evening in Beksanara when we first arrived. Thought it was just the usual swamp horseshit at the time.”

They looked at each other for a few moments in silence. For Archeth at least, it seemed that the breeze chose just that moment to chill the air, and a cloud wiped out the sun. But Egar only shrugged.

“Sure, could have been.”

“Could have been what? Horseshit?”

“No, could have been that fucker Takavach.”

Archeth blinked. “You believe that?”

Egar leaned forward a little. “Look, if he took the trouble to save my arse and magic me all the way down to Ennishmin, just so I could procure our old pal Angeleyes for the battle of Beksanara . . .” A shrug. “Well then, he’s certainly not going to balk at feeding your horse a few rotten apples to keep you pinned there for the same reason, is he? Or are you going to tell me you don’t believe in gods and demons and dwenda?”