Page 112 of The Simurgh

The Herlequin bellowed and corrected himself, but not before Silas got in another strike, so very near to his opponent’s shoulder. It glanced away at the last moment.

The pair of them were readily matched, their blows of equal measure, and Silas began to despair of anything but sheer exhaustion winning this fight.

He was slick with sweat beneath his clothes, and sweat teased at one of his eyes, making it sting. Silas was desperate to send a look down the dune, to reassure himself that Pitch had not been spirited away from him again. But the slightest drift in concentration and he’d end up run through for certain. He needed an advantage here, however slight, something to tip those horridly even scales in his favour.

‘A pity you will not join me. You could have been great.’ Christ almighty, the Herlequin was atrocious to listen to. ‘We could have brought the might of the Nephilim to this world together.’

He brought down the flail, catching the edge of Silas’s coat as he dodged the heavy move. The head drove into the sand, leaving a deep hole as the Herlequin dragged it free. Their rage-driven dance continued. Blade and flail meeting over and over, the clash of a hundred cymbals. And not once did the Herlequin relent in his unspoken assault, sending wave after wave of anguished thought against the barricade Silas had set around his mind.

Shit, they were making enough noise from atop this damned sand dune to draw the attention of all the worlds. That there was no sign of any other forces was as bothersome as it was a relief. Silas was so rarelynotpursued, to be left alone now made him strikingly uneasy.

Focus. Focus, man. One battle at a time.But he truly needed another tactic here, before they wore this sand dune down to glass.

‘Silas,’ Pitch yelled. ‘Do you need me?’

Of course he bloody did. But not the way the daemon meant it here.

‘No. Stay where you are.’ Silas thrust the blade forward with a parry that had the Herlequin hauling backwards.

‘Wise advice, brother. But I’ll have your prince soon enough.’ The cretin marked his words with another wave of grief, a despair so thick it turned the edges of Silas’s mind-woven barricade putrid. ‘And then I shall know what sound he makes as I raise him up like I did your dog, and break his pretty back over my knee.’

Silas pulled back. A sickening rage gripped him, sought to turn him into something mindless as he pictured this monster’s hands upon Pitch.

He breathed into his hatred, broke it apart, for he could not afford to feel so desperate.

Silas’s breath hitched. He saw the answer then. It had been with him all along.

He was Nephilim.

He was ankou.

He was not one or the other. And he was mightier than both.

Silas looked up at the Herlequin, that terrible wreck of a creature who towered opposite. The sneer on those ruined lips was unholy, the wild and desperate gleam in the bloodshot eye hungry for the chaos he had always known.

And so Silas would begin there.

He sent his thoughts forward.

How lonely you must be. How utterly without those to call a true friend. They have stolen so much from you.

He wasn’t sure his silent assault, a wave of pity, would find its mark. But Silas’s pulse thumped to see the Herlequin’s body quiver, his thin excuse for lips, twist.

He kept on.

The purebreds are right to name you a nightmare because that is what your master has made you.

As Silas opened his mind, he drew on thoughts of Forneus. Of the horror and despair that came with watching the hound die. He gathered up those feelings, wrapped them in the memory of the loneliness he’d suffered when he woke in Holly Village, and cast them back at the Herlequin.

The creature’s eye widened, and he stepped back as though Silas had just thrust the scythe at him, not simply played him at his own mind games.

‘You.’ The Herlequin hissed, slamming the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘You’ll not besiege me.’

But Silas had found an upper-hand, he’d hardly relinquish it now. He knew hurt and pain and anguish so well.

He was death, after all.

And all were helpless in her presence.