Owalan pales. “But Sorken,” he starts to say. I want to see what he says but I’m tugged, and when I drag my eyes back to what is happening, I see it isn’t even the Vagabond dragging me anymore. It’s her brindled dog, tugging my jerkin in his teeth, his claws scrabbling on the marble floor, two eyes blazing at me in two different colors.
I take one last look over my shoulder at the golems gathering themselves, at the dark demon shadows coalescing, at the broken body of Sir Coriand, and then I turn and run with the Vagabond and her dog.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Vagabond Paladin
Only a man … correction: only a man who was also a paladin … would decide that the way he was going to fix everything was by dying dramatically.
I just wished I could think of a better way to kill a nest of demons and keep them from spreading into the world.
Think! Think hard! This is madness.
But I didn’t know if that was the paladin or the demon speaking. It was becoming harder and harder to tell. I could no longer afford to guess wrong.
The dear, chivalrous, noble, holy, fool of a man. He’d let me sleep while he concocted this insane plan, and then I’d woken up to find that there were none left but us and two madmen and he had the only plan to fix any of it. And it was a terrible plan.
And he’d told it to me with those earnest brown eyes, so wide and innocent, like it would be the simplest thing in the world for me to hold his head under holy water and drown him.
For those who don’t know, holy water is meant more as a way to fortify your walls. The practice of casting out the demonic — the primary bent of my aspect — is much more art than science. It’s about as reliable and consistent as the rest of our lives — which is to say it’s not at all. Every single attempt at it is different, and while paladins claim that they wait for the God to lead them and respond to his will, I think most of the time they’re using a combination of instinct, hope, blind faith, and any little tricks they’ve picked up along the way. I’ve watched it done maybe a dozen times since I joined Sir Branson’s service, and the demons we encountered were weak and had generally already spent the energies of the one possessed in violence to the point that the victim was on the brink of collapse already. But in theory, you could release demons two ways.
One was the slow way, which Sir Branson had been trying with the beggar on the bridge. That way involved a lot of prayer and a connection to the God to essentially make yourself a bridge for his holiness to rush down and burn the demon away through your mortal vessel. It was the way I’d witnessed with every human we’d encountered up until that fateful day on the riverbank. Generally speaking, we had been able to lay hold of and restrain the victim so that we could do the slow work of prayer. It took time because your heart needed to be pure and your desires all attuned to the one result. Or at least, that’s what Sir Branson had always said. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble flipping my desires off and on like that.
The other way is the fast way. I’ve referred to this way before when mentioning Brindle. We’d used it on animals who were possessed. While they left their own trail of victims, they were considerably easier to dispatch, even if we’d left one man in such despair over the death of his donkey that his tears still came to mind from time to time. With that method, you killed the victim of the demon, and you prayed while you did it, hoping that the combination would make you an unfit vessel for the demon to hop to, and so with no living home, it evacuates the mortal plane entirely. It’s quick and dirty, but it gets the job done a lot of the time.
But sometimes — so rarely that I’ve never seen it and really only heard about it in the stories Vagabond Paladins tell round the fire when we meet one another — sometimes, the situation is very severe and we fear that even death cannot free the victim or seal the demon to retreat. In those cases, we will use holy water and we will drown the poor desperate person in that water. The water makes it much harder for the demon to leap. The soul it has bound with will force it from the body as the body is killed and bear it to another plane. Sometimes, with a skilled paladin who has done it before, the person can be brought back after death by drowning, and thus the victim is saved even though he has had to die for his salvation. I do not have that knowledge or skill.
But before you speak of cruelty, you should remember that you have not seen the horrors that demons inflict upon their victims, and the horrors they force them to inflict on others. Until you’ve looked into the eyes of a man so possessed that he has slowly flayed himself with a sharp knife and a mirror, and his soul is weeping within as his body turns the knife next toward those pleading eyes, until you’ve seen a whole family of tiny corpses and the person they trusted laughing over their broken bodies, until you’ve tried to patch up living victims so broken and ruined that they are like my tattered cloak inside — there isn’t even enough left to mend — until then, do not speak to me of what is cruel. Death — even death by drowning — is a sweet mercy compared to letting them remain in such a state, letting them suffer by their own acts, allowing the demon to twist their every flicker of desire into evil.
I knew why Adalbrand had demanded I drown him in holy water.
I knew what he would be when he let those demons into his body.
I knew, but I was not certain I could do my part. It was not that I wasn’t physically strong enough. He wouldn’t try to resist me, and I was a strong woman. It was the thought of him thrashing in my arms instead of relaxing into them. The thought of tamping down his bright heart and laughter under cold, clinging water as his soul bled away, instead of nurturing those smiles in him. It was the knowledge that it would be I who killed that bright holy man. I was not a murderer. And the one man I had killed already was the other man I’d loved — albeit as a father. Was I destined then to kill anyone my heart grew close to? It was too much. Maybe even for this cause. Maybe even to save hundreds or thousands of people.
Wasn’t it?
Well, wasn’t it?
We burst into the main room and I was immediately deafened. The clock began to gong the second our feet hit the mosaic of the main room. Bong. Bong. Bong.
It pealed out its crashing warning and when I looked at it — across from us — the face was lit by a narrow beam of light and the hands were spinning wildly around the face of the clock. I traced the light beam from the clock to where the window in the wall was wide open but nearly lost as it moved across the wall. The door to the sea was not yet open, but it was halfway there. Not long now and the demon would drop out of the ceiling and the way would be clear for us to flee.
“The cups,” Adalbrand gasped. “Get them.”
I scrambled to the loud clock. There was the High Saint’s cup, shattered to nothing. The crack in mine had run through and what little had been inside had run out. Adalbrand’s was burned so that charcoal coated the inside and not a drop was left. Sir Coriand’s was there, still and sludgy like mud. The only cups with steam still wafting from them, bubbling and growing, were Owalan’s and Sorken’s. I grabbed one in my off-hand and Adalbrand grabbed the other.
And as if that were the signal, the floor twisted, speeding up, and the bonging of the clock went wild. I heard shouts from the trial room and a crash as the door out began to twist past the point where anyone could flee.
I looked up and up, a tickly feeling racing down my spine. My eyes found the dark, gleaming shape immediately, despite the shadows above us. It was easing out from its filigree cage, out the opening made by the turning room, and the very second I spotted it, it dropped. I had a sensation in the back of my mind like a dish shattering, like something sliding down my back, wet and cold, something that was a sibling of dread.
I shuddered.
I did not wait to see how much faster it was than us. I had no illusions that it would be slow … or kind.
“It’s time, Lady Paladin.”
I didn’t know why he was offering his hand, but there was something in the gesture, as if even now, when he ran as hard as he could toward what he had planned to make his tomb, even now, he would shelter me if he could. Even now, he would offer what comfort he had, were it only a hand.
