Page 98 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6
The voice made Silas startle, its brush like a feather to the back of his neck. Izanami’s presence spilled through him, a warmth that chased off the chill of the water and offered air to starving lungs.
Take the blade. He was my child once, and you are yet.
But dangling from the Herlequin’s grasp, Silas was hardly within snatching distance. So he’d follow the goddess’s command another way. Silas shoved one hand against the bulk of the Herlequin, using it to lever himself before he kicked out with all the strength he could muster. Luck was at last upon his side. His length played in his favour, and his swing saw him able to strike the toe of his boot against Balthazar Crane’s wrist. The heavy impact drew a shocked, pained cry. With his vision more clouded than clear, Silas watched the scythe fly from the hands of its ankou. The blades glinted as they dropped into the brook, vanishing beneath the surface.
The Herlequin shook Silas, a violent thrust back and forth that would have broken his neck if he were not being braced by the Nephilim’s hand. He put both hands into trying to loosen the grip about his neck and sent both his feet in an assault against the huge creature that held him. Silas kicked back blindly, relishing the blows that landed against a solidness the Major Oak would envy. But this was a long way from freedom and even further from where the scythe had landed. Crane cradled his hand against his belly as he waded back into the brook.
‘Fuck, fuck…where is it?’ He slashed at the water with his free hand, dropping to his knees, the brook’s flow up to his waist.
Take the blade.
How Izanami expected Silas to do anything but fight to breathe, he could not say.
‘Quickly, ankou.’ The Herlequin’s order sounded near as horrendous as the skriker’s battle cry within the woods, a battle Silas hoped to all gods the hound was winning, because he himself was so very near to passing out.
‘I need a moment.’ Crane held his hand over the unsettled waters and closed his eyes, preparing to summon his blade just as Silas could have done the bandalore.
As heshouldhave done the bandalore, god damn it. Silas blinked through tears forced by lack of air, but his head was suddenly, oddly clear.
Take the blade?
Christ almighty, he was such a slow bastard at times. He had another scythe at hand. Silas went slack in the Herlequin’s hold, let go of all resistance, and opened his mind to intention. He slumped his head forward, closing his eyes, hoping fervently that the giant would fall for the ruse, and lessen his hold so Silas could breathe well enough to think straight. He turned his thoughts to the blades beneath the water, to calling on the scythe to heed him– to listen to its new master. For Silas was the firstborn among Izanami’s children. Her Pale Horseman. And bloody hell, hewouldget his way.
His blood thundered in his ears, deadening the sounds of the teratism and the hound that fought for him. His veins sought to tear themselves from his skin as his call went out. The silent summons was delivered to a scythe being pulled at by two masters. Silas felt the trembling of Crane’s hold upon his blades, tenuous and much disturbed by Silas’s sudden arrival.
‘Stop him.’ Crane’s protest was muffled, as though he was submerged in search of his scythe. ‘He’s trying to steal the blade.’
Any hope of a slackening in the Herlequin’s grip vanished at that. The leader of the Wild Hunt scorched Silas’s ear with his rasping voice. ‘Whatever you intend here, Brother, it is all for a lost cause.’ Brother. So this fiend did see Silas for what he was. Forpartof what he was, at least. It was an age since he’d been Nephilim. ‘Give up. Let go. For your prince is long dead.’
Sick fear filled Silas. ‘No.’ Had he actually spoken? It was hard to hear anything over the roar of his own heartbeat.
‘It is certain. And you can be sure the angels did not give him an easy death.’
Silas had the vague sense he should be enraged, or at the very least furiously indignant. Instead, there arrived a despondency, an utter, desolate surety that the Herlequin spoke the truth. The certainty hung from him, his bones turned to lead beneath his tattered clothes and bruised skin.
‘He’s dead…’ Silas echoed the words as the hold around his throat finally eased. He took in a breath, but the air barely made it down to his lungs before a sob expelled it.
Pitch was dead. And had died alone.
Why was the Herlequin smiling? There was no darker day than this. The birds should fall from the sky, the trees bend in sorrow. That fucking brook had no right to bubble so merrily.
Silas’s feet touched the ground, but his legs had no strength to hold him, and when the Nephilim released him, he collapsed to his knees, hands landing in the dirt, his desolation a shroud he’d never be fit to carry.
He’d failed. And lost so profoundly it paralysed him.
The distant sound of splashing reminded him of the other ankou’s presence. Of the blade he’d sought to own. But what did any of that matter now?
‘Keep him down awhile longer, Herlequin.’
Balthazar Crane needed not to have given any such command, for Silas couldn’t recall how to get off his knees. Nor did hewantto. He wished to sink into the ground, be buried as he’d been a thousand times before. Hide from this appalling misery. Was this why he was spared remembering each lifetime? No creature could survive a grief such as this, no matter the god that pulled their strings.
What an awful thing it was to feel love. It left a man ripe for tearing apart.
He pressed his forehead to the ground, the bruises made by the Nephilim aching. He could not bear this.
The skriker’s cry rent a hole in the air. The hound was close. So close that Silas was certain he’d see him if he could only find the impetus to raise his head. But what was the point? He had nothing to fight for now. Despair crushed him down, heavier even than what he’d felt when the teratism shared his vision.
He did not move when a black shape passed by, sending up flares of mud in its haste. Nor did Silas move when the Herlequin released a horrendous scream that made his bones quiver.