Crown (The Manhunters Book 3) Read online

  Rayph saw cuts and bruises and other savage things. Teeth marks, claw marks, and what looked like a brand that had been burned into Cable’s flesh. The more he looked, the angrier he became until he needed to crush Brody’s skull in his hand.

  “She doesn’t need anger, Rayph. She needs love,” Sisa said.

  And Rayph knew she was right. What was more, Rayph would not be able to summon Vanyel to his aid if he had this much anger in his heart. Rayph closed his eyes and reached out to a voice he had heard only once in the last ten thousand years.

  “Master, father, god, friend, I fight through darkness and memory to stand before you here in this place, the only place a man like me can meet with a god, in piety and genuflect. I meet you here as I had so long ago and I come begging,” the term bothered him. When had he lost the ability to beg favor from a god? When had his arrogance climbed so high he felt anger at begging for Vanyel’s hand? He knew it was wrong, so he addressed it immediately.

  “I can’t beg anymore. I used to be able to come to you in power, and devastating as I was, and still am, I was able to drop to my knees and beg favor. Somehow, somewhere, I lost that ability. I come before you now flawed by arrogance and righteousness, and I think that in some way you long to serve me your healing power.

  “Look down upon me from your lofty throne and see me struggling here in my own filth of arrogance and impatience. Find pity in your heart for my fumbling attempts and grant me the understanding of your will and ways. She has been harmed. Taken from and scarred, hollowed out and traumatized, and I am all she has. I am the only thing she can look to. So I come here to do your healing work. Grant me the power and let me set her body right.”

  Rayph waited for hours. He had bandages brought and bound her wounds with salves and ointments from his gathering of herbs and muds. He pasted her wounds as best he could. There were many forms of healing. He knew this. There was the healing done by a god and the healing done by man. Once he started his works, it came back to him quickly. He saw there would be no miracle. He called for a sharp blade, and while Sisalyyon wept and Cable slept, he carefully sliced the flapping bottom of her mouth away. The lip was taken away, and the sagging place where the jaw hung was cut off. The incisions were exact. Rayph could almost feel the hand of a higher power coursing through him as he made the cuts.

  He was able to stitch a flap of skin and make a collapsing throat. He was able to close the wound and make a hole big enough for food to be shoved into her neck. He was able to do some bit of a miracle in patching together the remnants of a face.

  When she rose from the tabletop, Cable looked into the mirror and she did not scream. She did not thrash and kick. She looked at what was left of her and she wept, a slow resigned kind of tears. The kind of tears that stole the heart from Rayph and left Sisalyyon combing back Cable’s red hair with trembling hands. Rayph let Ty into the room when Cable was dressed. He looked at his sister with pity for her and hate for the rest of the world.

  “This is the best you could do?” Ty asked.

  Rayph walked out. He did not want to look at wounded women anymore. He needed something to do. Healing had left him raw and stinging. He needed something to pull him out of it.

  Rayph needed Lori.

  Winged Grace

  Rayph climbed the rocks to the top of Ironfall and looked out over the city and the land beyond. From this place, he could see the whole shelf the city was built on. He could see the playhouse. He could see the Stalwart Dreark had built. It never seemed right being in that building without the Ganamaian, and after the first few months, it had to be boarded up. Rayph looked at the magistrate’s building. He would have to leave that place over to Dran soon. She was drying up not being in a formal setting. She needed the structure of a place like that.

  He could see Trysliana’s and Smear’s house. Rayph had thought a few times of getting a servant to clean it. He had in fact gotten the house cleaned by staff a few times, but it always reverted to its natural state. From his perch in the back of the city, Rayph could see the door half open. The dogs were eating something from the front yard again. Rayph knew the inside of the house was a wreck. They did not have the small section in their bodies that kept a clean house. Impeccable in their work they were. Impeccable at home was not in them.

  Rayph started thinking of his wife and the house they used to keep. His ache was too great. He closed his eyes and spoke a word, and the air before him ripped open. He could suddenly smell the salt of the ocean. He could hear the slamming of waves on rocks. Rayph stepped through his portal and out onto the side of a cliff. He looked out at the vista before him and gaped at the beauty of his wife’s home.

  The world was sky here. Far below him, waves made wars with rocks, but up here sky ruled. The cliff he stood upon stretched in both directions high above the water hundreds of feet, maybe thousands. Two worlds came together in this place and they did so too high for mortals to climb. Not far from where he stood the cliff fell away to form a land bridge that spanned out before him. It stretched a mile long to the other side where a cliff equally lofty stood waiting for it. The road it created narrowed almost instantly to no more than two feet. Rayph thought about the walk from one cliff to the next and nearly laughed at the lunacy. No sane person could make that walk, though many had tried.

  This was no simple bridge from one continent to the next. This bridge spanned another place as well. Rayph looked under the natural bridge to see winged forms flying around beneath. These were the guardians of the gate. The avelens had long ago vowed to keep all men from traversing the span of air below the bridge, for this place formed a gateway to another world. A threshold of sorts that took travelers to another time. Long ago, avelens swore to protect it, and Archialore had dedicated her life to its protection. She was out there, even now, scanning the skies, her men and women warriors patrolling alongside her as she fought to keep all intruders out, and Rayph wondered again about her life and his.

  She had spent her entire adult life fighting to keep people out of her home. Out of her gate. He had spent ten thousand years of his life fighting to stay out of his. He thought something lived in that statement, but he did not have the heart to tease it up. Instead, all he could do was slowly stare out at the flying bodies below him and try to find her.

  It was stupid to bother her. They were both tied, body and spirit, to their work. He never left his, she never walked away from hers. If he called for her now, he would be a nuisance. He could not do that to her. He had to leave. Had to go back to Dragonsbane and fight off this old evil. He would not bother her, he decided, but he would go to their home. Maybe just to see what had become of it.

  He turned around and walked into the trees. Thick underbrush, vines tight, tree formations. Rayph hated it all. Woods and wilderness were not his place. He was a man of the city. He walked through the mess of nature, thinking of himself as he was then, not so long ago, when they had come here to live together.

  He closed his eyes and could see it. He thought of this memory often, and every time he was naked. He ran and jumped and hid behind bushes and painted his body with muds as he tried in vain to hide from her. Every time she found him. Every time she swooped down from the sky to snatch him up and fly off with him. They played out in the forest and mud for hours. For days. There was no other word for it, frolicking was the only word that fit, and he knew now that he needed that time in his life again. He needed a time for it to be just him and her.

  He found their house and nearly wept. The roof was moss ridden and collapsing. The porch was cracked and broken, no longer a big solid rock. Now water had seeped in and in winter, frozen. It had shattered the rock and left a mess where once solid foundation had been. Many of the walls seemed to be falling off the side of the building and he shook his head.

  “Never great builders, were we?” he whispered.

  “No, we weren’t,” her voice said. At first, he did not move. He assumed. He assumed it was his mind playing her voice. Assumed
she had answered him the same way she always did, and that she was far from him in a place where only her voice could play at his mind. “We were pretty bad house builders actually.”

  Rayph froze. He slowly turned, and before him stood the only beautiful woman in the world. Her face was pristine. Carved from marble, pale and perfect. Her lips trapped him breathless, her eyes stole all motion from him. She at once freed him and seized him. Her wings were folded behind her back showing as only two humps rising from her shoulders. Rayph knew he was staring, knew he was wide eyes, gaped mouth, staring, but here she was. Her body tied him in knots, her smile owning him completely.

  “I– I–” Rayph tried speech, but it was too crude an instrument for him to master.

  “Love,” she said. It was a pure thought. A word that explained all, and when she spoke it, the might of the idea freed him. He jumped from where he stood with the spitting of a word, flying ten or fifteen feet into the air before her. With a pump of her wings, she met him, wrapped arms around him, and she looked up. He stared into her eyes as she pumped her wings once.

  They shot up from the ground as the sheer power of her wings launched them into the air. She tilted slightly and spun over and over again. She arched up over the world and looked him in the eye. She was so powerful, her body a magnificent perfection that allowed her acrobatics the mind could not comprehend.

  She hovered in the air, holding him, and spoke a word. Her clothing ripped away to nothing. He spoke and his clothing shredded from around him. Nothing but wind and flesh pressed between them, and Rayph slowly entered her. Her eyes widened and entire body trembling, she kissed him full on the mouth. With another pump of the wings they were off.

  He throbbed inside her but did not thrust. Her body held him tight inside and out, and he could do nothing now. Rendered helpless by her body and her power, he opened his eyes as he kissed her and the world twirled around them. She was soaring, she was diving, she spun and she climbed, and her eyes stayed shut the entire time. He pulled away from her kiss and laughed as the wind around them grew colder. She smiled at him, though now her cheeks were reddened, her body flush. The high air was cold, and Rayph clung to her for warmth. This part always made him nervous. It was the next part he dreamed about.

  She squeezed him tight, gripping his manhood as he throbbed, and she whispered to him gently the words he longed to hear.

  “What if I don’t do it this time? What if this is our time?” Her words, ripped and torn at this altitude, were nearly unintelligible, but he knew them as she said them, and he nodded.

  “Then this is our time.” He kissed her hard and full on the mouth, and she dropped from the sky.

  His erection throbbed and pulsed as the sky dropped screaming. He felt his body hard and terrified as it plummeted toward the earth. He kissed her again fast and panicky.

  She laughed and pumped her wings down speeding their descent. And he knew this might be the time. This might be the time she didn’t pull up. She had sworn to him one day she would die like this. The only thing she truly loved, she had said, was him inside her. She told him the night they wed that one day she would not halt their descent. One day this would be their death. He lay his head on her shoulders and let her drop. In that moment, he did not care. In that moment, death – this death – would be a gift.

  He looked at the ground racing toward them and he released it all. All the control, all the leadership and the responsibility, all of it drifted away from him and he let himself just be there. Just be with her, dying or living. He finished as he felt her come to her trembling orgasm around him and she twisted her back just so and changed course. She soared along the ocean surface for a while. Rayph relaxed, letting her carry him. Let her take him wherever she wanted to. The only real place he wanted to be was here.

  Strainus

  In horror, Roth watched as the bridge slowly collapsed in on itself. Arcturus and Tate ran as fast as they could, and Byron dropped to a knee and jerked his bag open. He pulled a thing that looked like a long pink tongue out of his bag. He gripped fistfuls of it and ran to the edge of the drop.

  When the bridge would no longer support their weight and it sagged in half, Arcturus grabbed Tate’s arm and gripped the side of the bridge. It went completely slack, and within a breath, they were dangling.

  “Do not fly!” Byron screamed over the sound of cracking stone and weeping, begging gods. “It will draw them to you.”

  From within caves on the opposite side of the cliff face came a droning wheeze as winged atrocities took flight. They possessed no faces. Where their faces would be housed only grasping talons and a pit-like hole. Their wings were fleshy and pale. They leaked rancid milk from teats that sagged from every section of their bodies, and they possessed whipping tails covered in barbs and horns. They swarmed and churned like a great cloud of hate and obscenity.

  Roth could only crawl to the edge of the drop off and stare in horror as his brother dangled from the limp skin of the bridge. Arcturus held him fast in one hand, his other suffering with one less finger, gripped the flapping bridge. Roth stared horrified waiting for the warrior’s grip to fail, waiting for him to drop Tate to his death and save himself, but that grip did not fail. That surly old veteran cursed wildly and laughed hysterically. He taunted the beasts in the air, calling them worthless scum and filth, and the entire time Tate fought for equilibrium.

  Byron dropped a great length of cord that had to be a foul thing’s severed tongue. He held it out over the edge, dangling it within reach of Arcturus.

  Tate slowed, his body stopped flailing, and he flexed his gloved hands. Roth knew that with a word Tate could pull both him and Arcturus over the side, but the nightmares flying around them would descend on them instantly. Roth could do nothing but watch, gripping the stones below him, and pray.

  Then Byron stuck the end of the rope into his mouth. Though he screamed, the tongue like cord flipped and curled. He gripped the side of the drop and the tongue wrapped Arcturus and Tate in its coils. Byron reached out desperately, and Roth and Burke grabbed him. As they pulled him back, Roth heard Byron screaming.

  The tongue scraped the edge of the cliff and began to tear and rip. The point where the tongue had grown into Byron’s mouth spat blood. Still Byron held. His neck strained, veins standing out bold and trembling as the man wept in pain, and they pulled.

  Byron sagged to the ground when Arcturus and Tate had been pulled over the edge. He rolled over and carefully spat off the tongue that bled and thrashed like a living thing on the ground.

  Roth dropped to Byron’s side and held him as the man sobbed. He could not stop thanking the man for saving his brother. Tate could do nothing but stare at the man who had just saved his life.

  Roth held Byron a long time until the world around them plunged into darkness and the temperature of the land soared.

  Byron coiled up his shredded rope tongue and stuffed it back in his bag.

  Every few hours Byron stopped to vomit blood. He was moving slower now, but they would not complain.

  “We ought to stop long enough for you to rest a bit,” Arcturus said.

  “No rest in Hell.” Byron spat with swollen tongue around a mouthful of blood. “We keep going. If we rest, they will find us.” He wiped bloody drool from his mouth and smiled.

  “Who will find us?” Tate asked. He seemed excited for the answer, as if a great mystery was being revealed to him.

  “Slavers. They rove in teams of five or six. They will have a Gulper with them, and they will move faster than you can imagine. You stop to rest here and they will be on you within an hour.”

  “When do you rest?” Tate asked.

  “You don’t,” Byron said. “You have to keep moving.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” Roth asked.

  “Don’t know. Maybe years.”

  “How do you survive without sleep?” Arcturus asked.

  “Made a de
al. Had an operation.”

  “What kind of deal?” Tate said.

  “The kind you don’t talk about,” Byron snapped. “I don’t sleep, I don’t eat, and I don’t drink. I paid dearly for it, and I will not talk about the deal or the price or the one I made the deal with. I’m done talking about it now.”

  Roth could not imagine the life this man led. He swore to himself that when this was all over, he would take Byron back to the world he was from. Roth’s cousin, Clarissa Pollax, was lady of the great city. He would introduce the two of them and Roth would talk to the king of Tienne about giving the man any aid he desired. If Byron wanted to relax for the rest of his life he could. Roth actually felt guilty not sending the man home now, but they needed him so desperately.

  The ground was cracked and broken. Byron explained that years of the two pieces of Hell slamming against each other had caused stress fractures in this section. Those fractures had intensified over time until the land had cracked in millions of tiny fissures. These pieces were shifting apart, and it made the ground unstable. After a few hours of careful stepping, the cracks started breaking apart even more than they had been, and Byron reached into his bag and pulled out his shredded pink cord. He placed its tip in his mouth and, with a quick lashing, bound everyone to the one beside him. The tongue wrapped around Roth, the meat of the binding vibrating and throbbing. Blood coursed down his body from the rope, and as they leapt over breaks in the land and moved slowly as one, Byron whimpered in pain.

  They reached a place where the fissures ended and Byron replaced his cord. They moved faster, though the ground was slick with a stone similar to glass. The land slanted down and soon it was a chore not to slip.

  “I don’t think I have to say this, but don’t let yourself fall,” Byron said.

  “Of course we will try, but let’s say we do slip, what happens?” Burke asked.

  “Well, the impact would shatter the glass we walk upon right now. You would slip into the crevasse. I want you to picture falling down a chute lined with glass as sharp and tough as blades. If you fall here, that is what becomes of you,” Byron sighed. “So keep to your feet.”