Page 97 of Shadow Throne King
A wolf’s claw was designed to protect the wielder from an electro mage’s dangerous attacks. But the blade I was wielding—that of an imperial soldier—was designed to focus and steer an attack. Tallu didn’t even hesitate, throwing a bolt of lightning at the blade, and I heard his intention in it as though Tallu had crooned it in my ear:Protect him.
In one motion, I sent it streaming at my attacker, his Krustavian blade swinging wide again. The electricity made him arch as it repowered him, and that was what I needed. I stabbed my blade through his exposed throat.
Another came up behind my attacker, and I yelled for Tallu. He sent a bolt at me, its casual strength a command.Protect him.
The electricity moved across my blade, flowing through the man I had impaled and hitting the one approaching. He spasmed, and the man I had stabbed suddenly froze, body going lax in true death as the electricity keeping him alive left his body. He dropped too fast for me to correct, taking my blade with him and almost breaking my wrists.
I didn’t have time to make sense of it because the one who’d been hit by the bolt—a Krustavian warrior—lunged forward, grabbing at me. My blade was on the ground with my last opponent, so I backed up just enough, and he stumbled, hitting the body, but righted himself, grabbing my wrist.
With a sharp grin, I let him have it, his hand closing around me, and then I used it to pull him forward, tripping him over the splayed corpse, twisting my wrist loose as he fell. He wouldn’t stay down long, but I knew how to kill him now.
I smashed down, my knee landing hard on the back of his neck, but even with a broken spine, he struggled and thrashed. He didn’t scream but bucked instead, trying to unseat me.
“Tallu, can you drain the electricity out of them?” I tried pulling my blade loose from the corpse, but I didn’t have the strength. Tallu immediately understood.
When he’d sent me a bolt of electricity through the other man’s body, it had taken all the electro magic contained in his corpse and sent it into the next body. Then he’d dropped, as dead as he should be, just as when Tallu had pulled all the electricity from the men in Maki’s experiments.
Tallu grabbed hold of his opponent and reached for the one I had pinned on the ground. I looked away as brilliant white lightning flashed, and Tallu grunted. He spit blood onto the ground, but the man underneath me was still, and the one Tallu had been fighting swayed, then fell to his knees, the impact making the whole room vibrate.
Iradîo had dispatched her own attacker, Naî circling and snapping the head clean off another.
On the throne, Maki smiled and smiled and smiled, so delighted that the grin stretched past what a human face should be able to accomplish. I could see his back teeth, his gums bright red from blood.
“I told him,” Maki said, his voice sibilant and crackling. “I told him, and still he doubted. That is the folly of man.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked Centipede.
“He thought his technique of bringing men back gave him power equal to mine. He thought—” Maki paused to chortle, the sound turning into a clicking, clattering sound like a thousand small pieces of stone striking each other. The lights in the room brightened, and the room seemed to heat with it, the brilliant white turning lava-orange, as though the black stone was about to turn back into the volcanic rock it had come from.
“You killed scores of imperial soldiers the last time they came,” Tallu said, stepping forward, Maki’s attention fixating onhim as soon as he opened his mouth. I let myself fade back, my feet moving silently.
I couldn’t escape into the shadows, but Tallu was doing exactly what I needed, what we’d planned for Eonaî to do. No one could look away from him. He controlled the room around him. Maki practically salivated as he looked at him, unable to focus on anything except Tallu’s powerful voice.
“I what?” Centipede asked. His voice shifted, dropping into Maki’s human tones. “No, the soldiers were killed by—what was it—monsters in the dark—but not?—”
Maki’s whole body shook, spine cracking and jaw working open and shut, his voice turning into a scream that vibrated the black stones. I didn’t wait, sprinting toward him, grabbing two swords off the ground where they’d fallen. I had already decapitated a man on the throne today, and Inor had Krustavian bones as heavy as the stones that they worked with.
In comparison, Maki would be easy.
He started to turn toward me, but Tallu said, “Are you saying that there is something in these mines more frightening than you?”
The words were mocking, a soft whisper of amusement in them. Centipede snapped Maki’s head back toward Tallu.
“I am animalia.Iam what they fear in the dark. I can take over their minds as they live, and now that I have Maki’s ways, I can control them even in death. There is no one more powerful than me.” When he opened his mouth, grotesque, distended mandibles extended from behind his teeth, framing his open lips.
“You couldn’t even keep hold of my brother. You are no more powerful than any other insect,” Tallu said, stepping forward, his ragged and torn cloak giving the effect of wings. “And I will crush you just as easily.”
He raised his hand as though to release lightning, and Maki leaned forward, grinning. But I was there, drawing my blade across his neck. It pierced all the way through, the skin parting under the blade.
Maki spun, turning so fast that I could hear the snap in his neck. Where my blade had parted the skin, a thick carapace wrapped around his neck. He grinned, the mandibles curving upward.
“You think a blade can stop me? I am animalia. The One Dragon dropped a mountain on me, trapped me with a fire dragon, and still I live.” He laughed, then reached out and caught hold of my arm.
I slammed my other blade into his temple, but he just kept grinning, his eyes fixed on me. In my head, I heard laughter, the promise of torture and death. I could feel it under my skin, feel it in my bones.
The whispers in my skin shivered up my spine and then a ball of white fury hit him hard. Naî grabbed hold of his arm where he had me, and her teeth tore at his elbow until he was forced to drop me, his other hand trying to pry her off him even as she ripped his arm from his body.
“Together,” I said and didn’t wait to see if she understood.