CHAPTER
44

Grief and rage jolted Rienne into motion. She sprang at the Blasphemer, Maelstrom exulting in her grip, and swung at him with all her strength. The Blasphemer raised his fiery sword to parry, and when the two blades met the sound was a piercing scream of metal that obliterated all other sound.

The Blasphemer’s face twisted in confusion—he was evidently feeling the same sort of life in his own weapon, and it surprised him. The expression was oddly human in such a diabolic face.

“Barak Radaam,” he said. “What is this?”

Maelstrom led her in its exquisite dance, flashing in circular patterns around her, drawing her arm in cuts and parries, leading her feet in lunges and dodges. Every blow struck the steel of the Blasphemer’s sword, bringing the unearthly scream of the two blades.

The Blasphemer was a clumsy partner for his own blade, stumbling through the motions of its dance, which was no less intricate than Maelstrom’s, if less elegantly executed. He struck when he was supposed to, fumbled into lunges as she stepped back, staggered back when she lunged. Fury twisted his face, and every blow Maelstrom blocked or dodged drew a snarl of frustration.

Rienne saw countless opportunities that Maelstrom didn’t take, but when she tried to alter the course of the dance, it resisted. Slowly it dawned on her that Maelstrom wasn’t interested in fighting the Blasphemer—it wanted to fight the Blasphemer’s sword. The dance of the blades was not a duel intended to establish a victor in the battle, so what was it?

Another blast of lightning crashed around her and the Blasphemer, and Rienne glanced over to where Gaven had fallen. The great blue dragon had one huge claw planted over Gaven’s body, and its other front claw held a shining red dragonshard. Lightning poured from its mouth and the dragonshard to whirl around them, adding to the storm of chaos that Gaven had started.

Rienne saw the rift where the Blasphemer’s words and Gaven’s dragonmark had torn through the world, some bizarre interaction of Blasphemy and Prophecy that threatened to unmake the creation, and she realized that the steps of the swords’ dance were leading them steadily closer to that hole in reality. She saw Cressa watching the battle in stunned silence, and the rest of the armies—Aundairians, Reachers, and barbarians alike—slowly finding their feet, breaking into scattered fights again or fleeing the field in terror.

“Yes!” the dragon hissed, exulting in the devastation. “In the city by the lake of kings, the city scourged with his storm, the Storm Dragon becomes as the Devourer, and he opens his maw to consume the world.”

With a dawning sense of horror, Rienne realized that the dance of Maelstrom and the Blasphemer’s blade was doing more than leading them toward the rift. Each wide sweep of her blade, she noticed, tugged at the raging forces around them, shaping the storm, giving form to the chaos. The Blasphemer’s sword had the same effect. She thought at first that the swords might be repairing the rift, re-creating the sundered world. But no—each cut of the blades tore at the edges, unraveling the fabric of reality still more.

“Now the world is consumed!” the dragon shouted, plunging itself into the lightless void that split the ground and air. Its body buckled and shuddered, and the rift contracted around it. The dragon became the void, spreading inky wings of nothing that annihilated everything they touched.

But if the dragon had sought to control the void by merging with it, it appeared to have failed. It hung suspended in the center of the raging storm, and the blood-red dragonshard floated at its heart, lightning streaming out from it even as it seemed to draw Rienne and the Blasphemer toward it. But the void seemed to be slowly consuming the dragonshard, drawing trickles of red like blood away from the stone to vanish in the inky depths.

The Blasphemer’s fiery yellow eyes met her gaze. In her dream, she had seen him as a demon, an incarnation of evil given substance solely for the purpose of destruction. But she saw now that he was flesh and bone, that he or a distant ancestor might once have been human. He was not so different from Gaven in some ways, drawn by the Prophecy into the role it demanded of him—not so different from her, really. Could he have chosen differently? Could he have arrived at a different destiny by taking different paths along the way?

But they had both arrived at this moment, along their different paths, bound to the same Prophecy and its fulfillment. They faced each other across their whirling blades, both drawn into the dance of steel and apparently powerless to stop whatever consequence might arise from the dance. They seemed to be unwitting partners in the destruction of the world, pawns of the weapons they wielded.

Her rage subsided, and she sought the stillness in the center of her soul. She first found the depths of grief, but she plunged her mind through it to a point beyond grief, beyond concern for her life. She turned Maelstrom over in her hand, and her mind slipped from history into eternity. She stepped back from the unending dance of the dueling blades, and the Blasphemer faltered.

Somewhere—far off, it seemed—Cressa began to sing again, her voice quavering. The dragon-void writhed in pain and contracted, growing visibly smaller as its dragonshard diminished. The Blasphemer roared in fury, stumbling forward as his sword sought Maelstrom again. Rienne stepped away from his clumsy charge, keeping Maelstrom low at her side. As he fought to regain his balance, she slid Maelstrom into its sheath.

The Blasphemer grinned, running the tip of his tongue across the points of his teeth as if savoring the anticipation of her blood. “Now you die, Dragonslayer.”

Rienne shook her head. She had spent her life mastering her sword, mastering her thoughts and emotions, learning discipline and technique, drawing on the deepest reserves of power in her soul. She would not be mastered by her blade or by the Prophecy—she would be a playwright as well, as she had said to Gaven so long ago. The Blasphemer, though, was willing to be a slave, enslaved to his rage, his hatred, his sword, and his role in the Prophecy. In all the ways that mattered, she and he were utterly unlike each other.

He lunged and she stepped around him, he swung his sword like a cleaver and she dodged and rolled. She found a position behind him and stayed there as he whirled in rage, trying to get her in front of him again. As the Blasphemer’s rage grew, the fury of the chaotic storm diminished, no longer fed by the clash of their blades. The dragon-void grew still smaller, thrashing in impotent fury as reality repaired itself around it, woven together by the strains of Cressa’s song. Finally the Blasphemer threw himself backward, thinking to knock her over, but she dodged that as well, and he landed hard on his back, right at the feet of the dragon, the very edge of the void.

The dragon’s lightless maw opened as the chaos sought to engulf the Blasphemer. His upper body slipped into the void and his eyes widened in fear. Another surge of lightning crackled around him like tendrils reaching to draw him in.

Rienne almost felt pity for him, but she shook her head. “You were the author of your own doom,” she said.

The Blasphemer snarled and swung his blade in a sweep at her feet. She stepped back to avoid the blow, and he tumbled into the nothingness beyond creation.

Cressa’s song was the only sound. The battle was over, it seemed. Both armies had scattered from the storming chaos, and hundreds lay dead. Cressa had begun a different tune, a mournful song with Elven words that spoke of the world’s first dawn. The song stilled the chaos and repaired the weave of creation, but it drew Rienne back into the depths of her grief. She searched around the field until she found Gaven’s body, then she fell to her knees beside him.

Clutching his dead hand to her chest, she wept until Cressa’s song was done.