17

  The trip to the marina was as irritating as all trips under invisibility were. They never lost each other's hands, which was fortunate, but they frequently had to wait when one or more of them tripped, often pulling down whoever's hand they were holding, or when they didn't manage to get out of the way of a passerby. One time a child tried to sprint between Simend and Dalibor, and the two jackals, unable to get their arms out of the way in time, caught the young fawn by the neck. Edric watched in terror as the boy's legs continued forward while his head stayed put, his eyes and tongue bulging out, until he fell heavily onto his back. Edric hurried the four of them away from the scene quickly, trying not to listen to the boy choke and clutch at his throat.

  Edric paused when they reached the marina, and Sara bumped into his back. He pulled her down towards the shore away from the boats and people. "Why is there a Star Cultist there?" Edric whispered once he thought they were all together. The robed and rotting man was speaking to a group of other Homines, all dressed in the uniform of the New Roman Legion.

  "I'm more worried about the legionaries," he heard Dalibor whisper back.

  "We can sneak past legionaries," Edric said. "But you never know what sort of radiant nonsense a Star Cultist is going to be able to do."

  "Are they all luminaries?" Sara asked.

  "No," Simend answered. "They use Astral relics without protection. They believe the radiant curse is a blessing from the Star even as it kills them, and they're so deeply cursed themselves that our symbiotes have trouble picking out individual relics they might have on them."

  "Do you know how hard it is to plan around literal insanity?" Dalibor complained. "I don't have decision hierarchies for this."

  "Can we find another marina?" Sara asked.

  That was when Edric's symbiote again began to throw warnings at him. "Oceanlord, please, not here," Edric whispered.

  "Only the Arbiter is listening," whispered Lucilius's voice from alarmingly close by. "And you're not the only one who can dispel illusions." There was a crackling wave of energy, identical to what Edric had blasted the skeleton with earlier, and their invisibility shattered.

  "They have come!" the Star Cultist shouted, pointing at them. "The Star has delivered its salvation unto us!"

  "Halt!" called one of the legionaries, and all four of the men drew their swords. "In the name of the emperor, submit!"

  "I'll show you submission!" Simend screeched, drawing his own sword and darting towards the legionaries. The faint sigils of his phantom blades leapt from his Astral arm and into the air around him.

  "Get to a boat!" Edric shouted at Dalibor and Sara. He began to draw radiance into his metallic fingers in preparation for throwing lightning.

  "Not a chance," Dalibor said. He had drawn his sword and interposed himself between Sara and their foes. "We can't go out onto the water until we know Lucilius is neutralized. He could sink the boat and kill us all without even trying."

  "Shit," Edric hissed. It was a good thing they had a warlord around again. He extended his charged arm towards the Star Cultist, but all the radiance he'd gathered bled back out of him. "What…?" he stammered.

  The Star Cultist cackled. "The Star's Chosen protects the true believers!" he cried. "What have we to fear from the tools of the Star when the Star itself protects us?"

  Simend charged past the first legionary, but the man managed to parry the worst of Simend's disrobing strike. Then their own warlord was upon him, tearing open his guard. Fortunately, Simend had trained long enough with the legion to know to duck and roll as soon as the opening was created, and the striker that came in behind the warlord hit only air.

  "Simend, to me!" Dalibor called. He charged towards the fight, his sword at the ready. "Sara, protect Edric while he figures out where Lucilius is!"

  Edric frowned. "I'm supposed to protect her," he insisted.

  "Do you expect me to find Lucilius?" she asked. She stepped into a neutral Sanguine dancing pose between him and the others. "It'd be great if you found him before the lightning starts up again. Or he decides to just grab me and run."

  Simend, rolling on the sand of the beach, pointed towards the other jackal. Then, with an uncomfortably eye-bending flicker and a streak of light, he was on his feet behind the advancing Dalibor. He doubled over for only a second, and Edric saw his friend struggle to hold back the bile rising from his stomach. Edric shook his head. Simend should not have tried to use the phase jump in the middle of an actual fight, useful or not.

  "Why can you use magic and Edric can't?" Dalibor asked as he squared off with the legionaries. They quickly began to surround the two jackals.

  Simend straightened up. "Great question," he asked. He reached out with his left arm, but nothing happened. "I can't anymore."

  "That's going to be a problem," Dalibor said. He flourished his sword. "Follow my lead."

  Edric yanked his attention away from the fight. He had his own work to do. He scanned the beach, trying to see if he could find the skeleton, but all he saw were crowds of people running away from the sudden fight. His Sioric heart-sense proved useless at finding the hidden skeleton as well, but its range was always dismal out of the water. He put his augmented hand to the side of his face, closed his eyes, and tried to listen to his symbiote. "Where is he?" he whispered, though he knew the creature could not physically hear him.

  "Edric!" Dalibor shouted suddenly. "Give us lightning!"

  "What?" Edric yelped. He opened his eyes, pointed at the nearest legionary he could see, and tried to throw lightning. The radiance again bled from his fingers, just as Simend conjured a fan of flames that ignited three of the other legionaries.

  "Ha!" Dalibor laughed, forcing back the final legionary with a flurry of thrusts.

  "You were right," Simend said. He darted among the screaming legionaries, slashing and stabbing. "He can only shut down one of us at a time."

  "Sara, to me!" Dalibor called, and the princess darted to his side. "You two, blow up that cultist."

  The cultist flung his arms into the air and fell to his knees. "Star, grant me strength!" he cried.

  This time, it was Edric's lightning that made it through. He watched it strike the man, watched the cultist's body convulse, saw the scorch mark on the man's robes. But the cultist did not fall. Instead, he rose to his feet as if lifted by strings and began to cackle. "Death cannot stop the faithful!" his body gurgled.

  "I am so tired of this," Simend growled. He charged towards the cultist, sword raised to run the man through, but the cultist drew a crooked, platinum wand from within his sleeve and leveled it at Simend. The jackal dove into the sand just in time to dodge the blinding beam of focused radiance that streaked through the air above him, turning a patch of sand to glass where it struck. "Shields!" Simend yelped. He pushed himself to his knees and raised his arm, but nothing happened.

  Edric barely managed to project his own shield in front of the dancer before another beam lanced from the wand. The bulk of the strike scattered across the face of the gleaming pane of cerulean light, but some of the radiance managed to punch through and pierce Simend's torso. The jackal screamed and fell to the sand just as the radiance again fled from Edric. His shield vanished. "Sim!" he screamed. The corpse again aimed its wand.

  Then Sara was there. She slashed at the cultist's arm with her battered letter opener, knocking its aim awry, and the beam of radiance lanced uselessly into the sky. With a bellow, Edric charged towards them. Time seemed to stretch as he watched the cultist clout her in the face, as Sara fell to the ground, as the man leveled his wand on the princess. Edric was too far away, and he could not find the radiance. There was nothing he could do. The cultist was going to kill her. He was going to have to watch while the radiance burned from the wand and lanced straight through Sara's perfect breast. He reached out for the radiance and tried to push himself to run faster, but he could do neither. He was not enough. "Sara!" he shrieked.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Sara looked up at the cultist from where she lay on the ground. She stared down the killing wand, her eye already bruising from his strike, and the fear on her face melted to surprise and then understanding. "You can't kill me here, can you?" she asked with a smile. The corpse began to tremble. "We're too far from a major relic."

  It was just long enough for Edric to reach the cultist and tackle the reanimated body to the ground. He bit the man's wand arm clean off, then used his sword to hack his head and remaining limbs into bloody smears. He couldn't recall the last time he'd been so terrified. And now so very, dangerously angry.

  When he at last got himself back under control, the cultist was more blood than flesh. Edric looked down at himself. His clothes were soaked through with the man. He panted as he scanned the beach. Dalibor had run through, decapitated, and dismembered the legionary he'd been fighting, and Simend had likewise made sure that the remaining charred corpses were in no condition to get back up and fight again. Everybody else had run off. There was not a person left in the marina.

  "If we're going to steal a boat, now's the time," Simend said. He staggered towards them, his free hand pressed against his midsection.

  Edric stood and shook blood from his hands. "I think I'll swim if it's all the same to you," he said. He spat. Apparently he still had blood in his mouth, too. He glanced over at Sara, and his stomach fell. She was very pointedly not looking at him. Her face was pale, and she had a hand to her chest as she stared down the beach, brows creased in a frown. He'd lost control in front of her, and she couldn't bear to look at him. How could he blame her? Look at him. He looked more like a feral shark than a person!

  Then she opened her mouth. "I can see you, Lucilius," she called down the beach.

  Edric and the others turned to follow her gaze, and there, not far from them, Lucilius stepped into view as though stepping through a wave of heat, again wearing the appearance of a living Homin in black leather. "And we can hear you, Princess," he called back. He spread his arms as he walked towards them. "It doesn't matter where you run. Your song echoes across the radiance everywhere. There is no place you can hide where we can't find you."

  "Then we'll just have to kill you," Simend said. He charged at the chemist, and his sword slashed straight through the man's stomach as though it wasn't there. The force of Simend's charge carried him well down the beach, and he nearly lost his balance as he tried to slow down and turn around. He grimaced and clutched at his side as he staggered. The blood was beginning to soak through his thick tunic.

  "I am Death," Lucilius intoned. "I am eternal. And you are coming with me, Sabina."

  Dalibor snarled and stepped in front of Sara. "She's not going anywhere with you."

  Edric saw Simend glaring between his sword and Lucilius. Then the jackal smirked, shook his sword, and smacked it with his augmented hand. But nothing happened. The lights on his arm were dim. So, Edric raised his own arm and prepared to blast Lucilius. The radiance fled as it had before, and the lights on Simend's arm blinked back to life.

  "Have you learned nothing?" Lucilius asked, still pacing slowly towards them. "The Star protects its own. I am untouchable."

  And at that, Simend ran the man through from behind, his sword entering Lucilius's lower back and exiting between his ribs. Lucilius froze, his mouth gaping and his eyes wide. He didn't even seem to breathe. Simend leaned forward over his shoulder, forcing his gladius deeper as he did. "I know that phasing trick too," he said with a smirk. "I'm not as good at it as you are, but it looks like I don't need to be."

  His arm flashed, and Lucilius's corpse fell loose from the once again physical sword. The chemist dropped to his knees, his face still frozen. Before Simend could move, the Enforcer's clothes and skin seemed to shatter, flickering into the air around him in a cascade of translucent triangles that quickly faded to nothing. The broken illusion revealed a Homin skeleton underneath, each of its ribs laced through with the platinum and crystal inlays of an Astral symbiote. Where his heart should have been, suspended by thick platinum cords, was a now-dull crystal, its polished yellow facets shattered where Simend's sword had run it through.

  Edric was still trying to understand what he was even seeing—Were each of his ribs a separate symbiote? Was he only alive because the crystal was powering him?—when Simend dropped his sword, clutched his side, and fell to the sand. "Sim!" Edric cried. He dropped to his knees beside the writhing jackal and pulled his friend's hands away from the injury. "Hold still!" Edric rolled Simend onto his back and leaned forward to inspect the wound. The ray from the wand had punched all the way through, cauterizing most of the tissue in its wake. Blood and other juices oozed freely from the hole.

  "You hold still!" Simend wheezed back. "I'm dying!"

  "Shut up," Edric told him as he tried to pin him to the sand. "That doesn't even make sense. And you're not dying. Well, not quickly, at least. Brace yourself, though, this is going to hurt."

  "Then don't do it! I'm in enough pain!" Both of them ignored Lucilius's skeleton when it slumped to the sand beside them.

  Simend wailed but remained mostly still when Edric raised the jackal's tunic, pulled open the wound, and began poking around in his innards. "Stomach's punctured. I think it got a kidney too." The shark leaned back, and Simend doubled up into a ball, clutching at his stomach.

  "That sounds fatal," Dalibor said, kneeling on the ground behind Edric. "I thought you said he wasn't going to die."

  "Yeah, Ed!" Simend whined. "I told you that I'm dying!"

  "Please don't encourage him," Edric told Dalibor. "He's always like this when he gets hurt, no matter how trivial it is."

  "It hurts less if I can be dramatic about it, you heartless fish!" yelled Simend.

  Edric rolled his eyes, then looked over towards Sara. The princess was looking away from them, her hands clutching at her own stomach. Edric gestured towards her with his head. "Keep her company," he told Dalibor. "I can mend him, but it's going to be unpleasant."

  "It's already unpleasant," Simend moaned.

  "Behave," Edric told him. He shooed Dalibor away, and the jackal went to stand with Sara, well away from the two luminaries. Edric shook out his right hand. "Let's get your tunic off so I can work. This is going to scar."

  "Why do you have to mar my beautiful coat every time?" Simend asked. He clenched his teeth, rolled onto his back, and wriggled the rest of the way out of his tunic. "Just knock me out and get it over with."

  Edric clacked his fingers against his thumb several times, stretching crackling arcs of lightning between them. "You sure?" he asked with a smirk. "You said you'd never trust me to knock you out again after last time."

  "If you shave off one hair more than you need to, Hand of Thunder, I'll feed you your own fin."

  "Guess we'll have to see well I respond to threats," Edric said. He put his metal-clad fingers against Simend's temple. "Nighty-night, buddy."

  "I hate you so much," Simend said, and with a single spark from Edric's fingers, he convulsed and fell unconscious.

  Edric smiled down at his friend. "Love you too, brother," he whispered. He gazed at the unconscious jackal for only a moment before frowning at the augmented skeleton lying on the sand beside him. He didn't want to leave it there, and Kamissa would flay him if she found out he'd left such a host of Astral relics behind for the Star Cult to collect, but he couldn't carry all of it and he didn't have time besides. He shook his head and called to the others. "Dalibor! Help me get him into a boat. I'll work on him while you two are rowing us across the strait. The city guards must be coming, and this will take too long."

  They laid him in a puddle in the bottom of a stolen dinghy, and Edric, after a quick dip in the ocean to wash off the bulk of the cultist's blood, sat cross-legged next to him. He took several deep breaths while Dalibor and Sara rowed them away from Thracia. Then he got to work. He lightcrafted meshes across the holes in both organs and flesh, letting his symbiote interface with the jackal's own symbiote so it could guide him to all the right places. The boat was approaching the far shore when Edric finally finished coaxing the tissue to regrow enough to stop the bleeding. He sighed, dispelled his meshes, and inspected his work, idly shaking out his tingling arm. All that remained of the injury was a small circular patch on Simend's midsection, both front and back. Edric shook his head. This was far more work than he liked to do with his symbiote on any given day, especially after blocking a half dozen direct lightning strikes and running four people invisible across a city.

  "Is he going to be okay?" Sara asked.

  "He'll be fine," Edric said, still shaking his arm. "He'll need to take it easy for a while or the wounds will reopen, but he's not in any significant danger anymore. He should wake up soon."

  "We have company," Dalibor said.

  Edric looked towards the shore and sighed again. A well-dressed customs official, flanked by a pair of Chalcedon city guards, wrung his hands as their boat approached. Edric could only imagine what the bucks thought of them. Dalibor and Sara were spattered with blood, and Edric himself was still dripping wet. The ocean water had rinsed off his skin, but the blood that had soaked deep into his tunic had not washed out completely. With a groan, Edric crawled to the front of the boat, making sure all the lights in his arm were shining brightly. "Ahoy there, friends," he called. "There are four of us making entry today."

  Edric could see the customs official tremble, and they weren't even ashore yet. "I'm going to need to see your entry passes," he stammered.

  Edric gave the buck his fullest, toothiest smile as their boat finally scraped onto the beach. "Funny story, that," he said. He pointed back towards Byzantium and stood up. "There's a pack of New Roman legionaries back on the Thracian shore that must still have our papers. Normally I'd offer to pay you for the inconvenience this must cause, but today I'm just as distressed about their behavior as you are, so you'll need to take it up with them directly. I know that may prove difficult, but if you like…" Edric stepped out of the boat, clenched his metallic fist, and let stray lightning dance over his skin. "I can arrange for you to join them before the Final Arbiter."

  The customs official grabbed the nearer of the two guards by the arm and dragged the larger buck in front of him. "This is highly irregular," he stuttered through his chattering teeth. "I'm going to have to ask you to go with these fine officers."

  "Not a fucking chance," the guard said, shaking off the customs official. "I don't get paid enough for this."

  "Me neither," agreed his partner. "Just don't cause any trouble, got it?"

  Edric nodded. "We need a place to sleep tonight, and then we'll be out of your city at dawn," he told them.

  "Fantastic," the larger guard said. "Come on. We're taking a break. I don't expect we'll see many boats landing for a bit."

  Once Simend had woken up and finished complaining about the new permanently bald spot on his belly, they gathered up their things and rented a pair of private rooms at the nearest inn. That night, when Edric's thoughts finally drifted to Binta, he, for a change, felt guilty. He stared into the darkness of the room he shared with Simend, flat on his belly and chin resting on his crossed arms. He didn't feel guilty because of what he had just done. Nor because there was a very satisfied, very naked jackal sprawled in his favorite spot across the shark's bare back. Not even because he enjoyed what he'd just done far more than anything he'd done with Binta.

  He felt guilty because, before they had turned to Binta, his thoughts had drifted to Sara.