Page 105 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6
Silas’s skin tingled, the goddess feeding on his fervour. ‘Traitor.’ He ground out the word. ‘Your goddess’s end will come as surely as yours.’
Balthazar Crane’s eyes widened, and he tried to speak, to utter his last words. Silas slipped his hand around the ankou’s neck and held him in readiness for the blow they both knew was coming. The blade shivered at his touch, the metal warping like tin in the midday sun. The twin blades merged, and confusion emanated from the scythe like a fine sea spray as it threw off what remained of the goddess who had stolen it.
Crane stared up at him, revealing in the depths of his eyes the shadows of divine sisters at war. The ankou was still defiant, still raging, but through his eyes alone. He did not seek to shake off Silas’s hold nor slither from beneath his weight.
‘I wanted more time.’ His eyes bulged with speaking through a choked throat. ‘I just wanted more time…a year…it is not enough.’ The ankou’s last moments were pitiful. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘You have no say in the matter.’ Silas leaned close, made sure his words could be heard over that of the warring skriker and Nephilim. ‘None of us do. And if your betrayal has harmed Pitch again, I’ll hunt you down in the life that comes after this one, and you’ll know no peace there either. You deserve none.’
‘Silas, please–’
Death came as quickly for Balthazar Crane as it did a beggar on the street or a king upon his throne. Without apology or recourse. Swift and final.
The only difference here, the ankou saw it coming, arriving in all its macabre beauty.
The scythe he had wielded just a few moments before now drove itself deep into his heart, searching for, and finding, what had alluded him when he did the same to Silas.
Izanami reclaimed her blade and cut away the foetid tether that had granted Balthazar Crane a power he’d chosen to abuse. Silas twisted the blade, as She swept the ankou from Her service. The force of the disconnect was bone-jarring. Silas grimaced, weathering the unpleasant discord that ran through the blade: a very human stew of regret and angst, desire, delusion, and, at the very last, desperation.
Silas shuddered, and pulled the blade free.
His blade.
The metal hummed, the vibration tickling at his hand. Silas felt Izanami’s pleasure as surely as he felt his own deep sense of relief. Her blade returned to its original form, a pair of silver spectacles, no more impressive than the bandalore. On meeting the ankou the first time, Silas had wondered why on Earth he would need glasses. Of course Crane hadn’t, they were costume, a convenient disguise for his scythe. But hehadbeen blind. Those glasses had granted Balthazar the extra time he’d been so desperate for. Greed had killed the ankou as surely as the blade just now.
A high-pitched, frantic yelp had Silas rising to his feet and turning about in time to see the Herlequin raising the struggling skriker above his head, his wide hands set at the hound’s haunches and neck, his knee raised so his thigh was laid flat. Forneus’s black fur was made darker in glistening patches, wounds bleeding, his enormous black tongue lolling as he fought to free himself.
‘No!’ Silas screamed and lunged.
The Nephilim fixed his central eye on Silas as he brought Forneus’s body down. The hound’s shriek was tainted with anguish and cut off cruelly as the Herlequin broke the skriker’s back against his thigh. The terrible crack of the hound’s spine was all Silas could hear as he dove at the Herlequin, incandescent with rage.
It was like diving against a wall of solid stone, and for a moment Silas feared for his own neck with the sudden stop. But though the Herlequin was a massive beast, Silas was not insubstantial. The Nephilim staggered back, and Silas threw his weight behind the glance of his blade.
‘You fucking bastard.’ He stabbed wildly into the endless pleats and folds of the Herlequin’s cloak and clothes beneath as the Nephilim tried to peel him off. Thoughts of a wall of stone returned when the blade seemed to find impenetrable layers. Firm resistance threatened to dislodge the scythe from Silas’s grasp as his fury, his grief, made his blows too frenzied to be precise.
The Nephilim snarled and delivered a mighty punch beneath Silas’s chin. The strike threw him away and brought on stars and mottled vision. Silas landed hard against what he thought was a true stone wall but was likely one of the many wide-girthed trees surrounding them. A punishing blow that snapped the scythe from his hold but achieved little else. Forneus lay unmoving, no hint of his crimson glare. Silas’s chest was hollow with the skriker’s loss, a loss he knew resonated through countless unremembered years. His heart ached as he searched about, near blind, patting at the ground in the hopes of finding the lost scythe, the tug of anguish threatening to overwhelm him if he stilled for a moment. But barely was he grounded and Silas was being gathered up again. Fingers bit at his thigh as another hand clasped at his neck, hard upon his windpipe. The Herlequin raised him, just as he’d done the skriker, hoisting Silas overhead with barely a grunt, as though he were a belt won in the ring and no heavier.
Head pounding, some teeth likely shattered, Silas fought the appalling hold, wriggling his hips, kicking about with his leg that was not pinched into submission by the numbing grip of the Nephilim. It must have been like trying to keep hold of an oiled serpent, but the bastard managed it. Christ almighty, the strength of the creature was truly monstrous. Or Silas was too weakened to prove a foil. His kicking and shifting about only earned him a more brutal hold upon the neck, joints wrenching as body and head moved in differing directions.
‘You are worse than your dog, Brother.’ Glass slid and made fine cuts against Silas’s ears as the Herlequin spoke. ‘For you at least should put up a fight worthy of your lineage. But you have never been a fighter, have you, ankou? For here you are, a pathetic servant of death, when you could have lived in glory for our lord and father, who shall return.’
Live for Samyaza? Silas would sink to the bottom of that loch a hundred times over to elude such a fate. But there was no chance Silas could reply; he could barely draw enough air as it was. All efforts with his free arm and leg, trying to land a blow somewhere, anywhere that might be useful, were as effective as a wind-whipped flag. Silas coughed against the chokehold. The contorted ruin of Forneus’s body was all he could see.
The Nephilim was right, was he not? Silas was pathetic.
The skriker had given himself up for a master unworthy of the sacrifice.
Silas’s fevered attempts to free himself shuddered and fell apart. He hung like a true corpse above the Herlequin, ceasing the futile game of hide and seek he played with anguish. Why not let it win now? It would always find him. Find any living thing. There was no escaping loss…death…sorrow. He was going to lose Pitch…of course he was. Silas had spent thousands of years losing all he knew and loved.
A dreadful sound came from the Herlequin, another which sounded too much like corrupted laughter. The creature braced, grip tightening, and he tossed Silas away. Not downward, as he’d done with the skriker, but out towards the trees again.
Silas could not find the impetus to do anything but let the momentum take him. Let the hulk of an oak or elm or birch bring him to a violent, gut-tangling halt. Why had he ever cared which tree was which? Pitch was right. It was pointless, uninteresting. And all trees would die. Silas would lose every single one of them, too.
He struck the nameless timber, and thumped to the forest floor, his cheek upon the damp soil, his mood so wretched that repair seemed impossible. Which was not the least he deserved, considering all those he had failed this day.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, sending tiny fragments of decay floating about as he sank deep into the sands of melancholy. ‘You deserved better than I.’
A silver glint drew his eye. The spectacles lay not an arm’s reach away from where he wallowed, bruised to his very core. They shone again, as though there was something to brighten for in these bleak woods.