Page 136 of The Simurgh

‘Stay where you are, another step closer—’ Pitch was not happy, that caustic growl upon his words. ‘I swear if you so much as –’

‘Gods, calm down you fool. I should have left you in the blasted pit.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Pitch snapped.

‘Because I’m a masochistic idiot.’

There was a tiny squeak, as though someone had trod on a mouse. And a distant hiss, which might be Pitch’s flame, still shielding them from the dreaded rain.

Silas exhaled, trying to coax his eyes to open. Exhaustion held them closed. Exhaustion, and the mass weight of all the gloom that encompassed the trapped souls. The fight with Morrigan made him shiver hard in Pitch’s embrace.

‘It’s all right, Silas. There is nothing to fear from him.’

Silas tried to work his tongue around some words that might make more sense than the daemon’s. Fear from who?

But the echo of his encounter with Morrigan dragged him back under, where the memories left a foul taste in his mouth. What an atrocious thing; the fight, and the hunger of that goddess for her place in this world. Morrigan thirsted for conflict and strife, violent death, where Izanami preferred the passage of time to bring the souls to her realm; a natural decline of the flesh, the cycle of life drawing to its close in bodies never meant to know anything but brevity. In the cave, Silas had become his goddess’s corpse, the decaying flesh long since shed by the anguished souls. His body became their path to death’s release. A freedom denied them by Morrigan.

Pitch shifted, still arguing with whoever stood nearby, and Silas winced. The gouges upon his body were so many he felt barely held together. But beneath the sting and bite and agony of broken flesh there was something…powerful, borne of grief and found freedom.

A touch came at his cheek, one he assumed from Pitch, until the daemon’s words told him otherwise.

‘Let him be, Scarlet. Don’t touch him.’

‘Scarlet?’ A deeper voice came. ‘I thought the damned thing named Crimson?’

A spattering of irritated chirps made Silas’s heart lift. He opened his eyes.

Silas lay in a sea of rainbow light, a tiny blown-glass figure at its heart, those bloody awful motionless eyes, two tiny white orbs with jabs of black at their centre, were trained on him.

‘Scarlet,’ he whispered over a bruised tongue.

The wisp let out a squeal of the highest order and swooped in to land pecked kisses on the tip of Silas’s nose.

He laughed, and his heart shed a piece of lingering sadness.

‘Leave him be, you ridiculous creature.’ Pitch swatted at the will-o’-the-wisp, and with the raising of his arm Silas had a clear line of sight to the man who stood over them.

‘Fuck.’ Silas forgot all his ills, scrambling in a messy, pain-ridden leap to his feet, earning indignant exclamations from both the wisp and the daemon. He staggered in front of Pitch, ignoring the prince’s shouts to stop.

The scythe morphed as he moved. Adopting its broadsword guise, the basket hilt a deeper grey-silver than the blade, and with etchings upon the smooth surface absent before his fight with Morrigan.

‘Get back, Lucifer. You’ll not have him.’

He lashed out, having but a moment to realise it was the king who shielded them all beneath daemonic flame, and not Pitch as he’d assumed.

Silas’s blade flashed, and it seemed certain to meet its mark. But at the very last Lucifer stepped out of the way, taking his flaming shelter with him. Subjecting them once more to the torrential downpour. Well, all of them, save for Arcadia’s king. Lucifer stood in a small circle of taunting dryness.

The daemon produced his own weapon. A shockingly large sword of the most remarkable design. The king was a tall man, near to Silas’s stature, and the sword was easily his length, with quatrefoils large as saucers. The blade was white as porcelain, and gleaming, freshly scoured.

But Silas would not be waylaid by the magnificence. He’d been a fool to think the daemon king no longer a threat. He attacked again, his wounds screaming, Pitch’s shouts ringing in the background, near lost beneath the steady drone of falling water.

This time the blades of death and daemon met.

The earth shuddered.

And both king and ankou cried out. Each propelled away from the other with such force it was a miracle that Silas kept his feet. Especially so, considering the unevenness of the ground. He saw now where they stood, a rocky mound, barely wider than the first cave they’d hurtled into. There was a pile of rocks behind where Lucifer now righted himself, a hint of a cavity behind its barrier. This was an island in a rough sea. Froth-tipped waves slapped at the edges of their haven, and Silas glimpsed whirlpools further out.

If he’d stumbled just a few more steps he’d have been in the water.