“And he whispered in the ear of Sir Kodelai and prepared him as a good wife feeds the yeast in her bowl. And that night, when all of you slept, I came to the High Saint and I confessed all the doubts I had about you, Beggar. Confessed in a heartfelt, wretched manner, and told him too, how you inspired sin within my heart. Not the truth — but he didn’t ask me directly if it were true, so I broke my oath and lied. And it was that lie he brought to Sir Kodelai that morning, feeling duty bound to do so. It was that lie that turned Sir Kodelai’s eye away from the golems he was considering as perpetrators, and toward the ragged, dirty, mud-streaked girl with her filthy mockery of our aspects. That’s the power of words, girl. Pick the right one and you can use it like a long lever to twist the heart of man into a knot unrecognizable. I did. And I did it well. Men are just machines, after all. No different than a golem made of rag and bone.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice is small, her doubt creeping back.
“The God cares no more for you than poor Suture here. But one of you will soon be dead and the other has never lived at all.”
And with those words, he presses his attack. His golem grabs Brindle and throws him so that he smacks a stone Saint statue hard and falls to the earth, limp. His other golem leans in, arms reaching with intent, and in that moment I make my choice.
Better to die in the name of the God than to live as creatures turned and twisted. I’ve always known it, but it is real to me right now.
And for the first time since we’ve reached this place, I really pray.
I pray from deep in my bowels, from the very visceral blood and tissue of my body, from the place at the base of my spine where my soul is knit, from where my heart reaches up like a flowing spring and my brain branches forth like an oak. From that place I reach with all I am to the God and I beg him.
“Deliver me from evil.”
Perhaps I have also said it out loud. Perhaps I have shouted it. I do not know. But I feel the response.
Light and heat crash over me as if someone has flung a bucket of fire over my head.
It is not pleasant, shining glory. It is nothing I might revel in or preen under.
It is like being dredged under by the grip of illness. It is like the fever dreams that wrack you to the bone when they twist and rend and seek to separate a man from his very sinews. It wrenches and wrings me so furiously that I retch down onto the sand. I lose all sense of time and space and the knowledge of my own form, until at last my eyes shoot open and I watch as a great shadow is vomited from my mouth and falls hot and heavy to the ground.
I feel as if a burning coal has been touched to my mouth. My limbs are suddenly free. The book I had written in is aflame, burning with a fire so white I can hardly look. I grab the ash and flame in my bare hands and rip the book apart, flinging it to the sand. I do not even feel the flames. I am already burning.
I stand with superhuman agility in the crisscross of the leather straps, and I leap.
No man should leap so far and live. I have no explanation for why I do not break both tibias and shatter my legs as I hit the ground.
I have heard of the great acts the God allows in times of desperation. My only explanation is that here and now I have been gifted a reprieve from the laws that govern the earth, and that for that space of a heartbeat, my body and bones belong only to the God and not to any of the rules he buckled round the earth when he wove her form.
I land with my feet on the shoulders of Suture and my belly pressing down on Sir Coriand’s back. I feel the bone golem buckle under the sudden force, driven to his bone knees on the marble of the floor. There’s a splintering sound and then Sir Coriand tumbles out from under me, somersaulting. He rolls upward, dagger flicking from its sheath like the tongue of a lizard as he seeks to come up under the Vagabond’s guard.
I’m distracted as I find my feet.
A faint bark arrests me and I spin in time to turn Owalan’s strike.
Another head strike? Is the man doubly a fool? He certainly seems to revel in such nonsense.
I press my own attack, drive him back, and then backhand him hard across the cheek. My strength must be greater than I remember, because he rolls through the air like a barrel down the hill over and around and over again until he smacks the floor hard, his hands unable to get up and protect his face from the blow. I fear his neck may be broken but I have not the time to check.
Already, I am spinning again. I am leaping just in time to use the weight of my own body to turn aside the stone punch of Cleft as he reaches for the Vagabond.
She’s locked into a dagger fight with Sir Coriand, the dagger gripped in her off-hand. She refuses to drop her sword but its bulk is too great for this knife battle and the old paladin is inside her reach.
My breath wooshes out of me and my breastplate crumples painfully into my flesh as I take Cleft’s blow, but some of whatever blessing the God has gifted me clings to my body and I drop my sword, grab his stone fist in both hands, and shove with all my strength. He stumbles backward and then freezes.
His sudden motionlessness leaves me off-balance, and I complete my spin unhindered and crash into him, my backplate into his stone chest. He falls backward, balance lost, stone crashing into stone with a horrendous smashing sound.
I stumble, find my bearings, and look up just in time to see Sir Coriand drop his dagger, an angelic expression on his elderly cherub face as the Vagabond’s sword slashes a perfect arc through the heavenly light and cleaves his head from his body. It follows the arc of her blade like a perfectly thrown ragball, spinning ribbons of red out from it in arcs like a maypole at festival time.
I don’t have time to react. It comes right for me, smacks my ruined breastplate, and lands at my feet, so that all I have to do is bend forward to look straight into the face of evil.
The face of evil looks back at me, blinks once, and then freezes in a smiling rictus.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Vagabond Paladin
