I Was Experimented On By The Government. Ragnarok is Here. Part 11

I hit the legion feet first and the legion came apart around me.

The drop was forty feet and the armor took all of it, the joints flexing a half-thought ahead of my knees, and I landed in the middle of a column of the hollow with the Aegis already moving. The first one folded across the shield edge. The second and third came in from either side and the silver blade opened both of them in one pass, and they went to black dust the instant the edge left them, and I was already through the space where they had been. Ten in the first breath. Twenty in the next. The new body ran a half-second ahead of the old one and the fight arrived at that speed, each hollow thing exactly where I expected it and gone before it finished arriving.

The square lay two hundred yards east and the whole Division was pouring toward it.

Exo suits came off the Tyssedal road at a run, grey and enormous, each one wading through the legion like a plow through snow. Behind them the agents advanced in bounding pairs, flame lines going down ahead of them where the Carrion Crawlers came low along the gutters, and over all of it the green flares hung steady in their chain. Thor's hammer lit the valley white somewhere past the smelter buildings. The thunder of it rolled down the fjord a full second later and rattled the cobbles under my boots.

I cut north toward the water and the mountain that stood over it.

Something hit me from the left hard enough to turn me half around.

It wore a face I knew. Vaelith, the sin of Pride, its composure rebuilt in the ten days since the Sahara, the smile that had never quite assembled all its parts now assembled, and it came at me with a speed it had kept hidden in the desert. Its hand closed on the edge of the Aegis and its other hand drove for the seam at my collar, and it spoke as it came, something with my name in it and the word finally.

I stepped through it.

That was the whole of my answer. I put my shoulder into its chest, let the armor take its strike on the seam, and kept walking north with the sin of Pride hanging off my shield arm like a coat I intended to shrug off. It hit me twice more in the ribs, hard enough that the old body would have folded. The new one registered the blows and forwarded the information to somewhere I could look at it later.

Then Abel arrived.

He came in from the north at a dead sprint, low, the blue blade held back along his forearm, and he hit Vaelith at the hip with his whole weight and both of them left the ground. I watched them cross ten feet of air together and go through the front wall of a hardware shop, glass and timber and a rack of snow shovels all going in with them, and the wall folded down over the hole behind them.

"I have this one." Abel's voice, from inside the ruin, over the sound of something heavy being thrown into something heavier. "Go. I'm making a point."

The blue blade lit the inside of the shop white, twice.

I went.

Alaric fell into step on my right before I'd cleared the block.

He came out of a side street with Excalibur bare in his hand and the scabbard riding his hip and blood on one side of his face that had already stopped running, and he matched my pace without breaking his, and we looked at each other once. One nod, both directions. The whole of Camelot and Purgatory and the grey stone sat in it, and neither of us spent a word on any of that.

"The two I had committed to the square pulled off the moment the exo line crossed the river. North, toward the mountain, at speed." He wiped the blood off his jaw with the back of his sword hand. "Four of them went. The fifth is the one your friend just put through a shop window. Four Apostles leaving a fight together is either retreat or it is something worse than retreat, and I have never seen the Seven retreat."

"Then it's the something worse."

"Yes. I suspected you would say that."

The street ahead of us filled.

The legion came around the corner of the smelter's old loading yard in a mass, hundreds across, and the Crawlers came under them along the ground, and the whole thing pressed toward us up the narrow street with the buildings on either side channeling it into a single black flood. Two of us. A street's width. Three seconds until it reached us.

Alaric stepped ahead of me and raised his free hand.

Blue fire came off his fingers.

It had a shape, at first, a small one. A fox, or the outline of one, blue-white and running along the cobbles ahead of him with a lit tail streaming, and it ran at the flood and I had time to think that it was very small against what it was running at. Then it reached the first rank and stood up.

The fire stood up the whole width of the street. Building to building, gutter to eave, a solid wall of it, blue at the base and white at the heart, and the legion ran straight into it because the legion had never learned to stop. The front hundred went to nothing. The next hundred pressed in over the ash of the first and went the same way, and the Crawlers came under it low and fast and found no low to come under, and the whole flood poured itself into a burning wall for the length of a held breath and then there was very little left to pour.

Alaric lowered his hand. The fox ran back up the empty street to him and went out at his boots.

"The Oracle."

"Among other things. I have been practicing on the ferry crossings." He turned to say more and a shadow came down over both of us.

The Grendel dragon hit him at the shoulder.

Smaller than the great one folded against the cliff above the town. One of its brood, the size of a transport truck, all wing and jaw and hooked forelimb, and it took Alaric off his feet and drove him twenty feet down the cobbles and pinned him there with its whole weight on his chest and its head coming down.

Alaric put Excalibur up through its throat from underneath.

The gold went in and came out the top of the skull, and the dragon's jaw stopped a foot above his face, and its whole body went slack over him in the space of a breath. He shoved it off, and rolled, and came up onto one knee with the sword still lit, and looked at me standing there with the Aegis up and the blade drawn back.

"Do not make it dramatic. I had it." He got the rest of the way to his feet and pointed the sword north, past the shore ring, at the black mouth in the base of the cliff. "The mountain. Go."

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, and it felt like a thing I had not done in a very long time.

"Hold the street."

"I intend to hold rather more than the street. I keep telling people this."

The square was ours by the time I cleared the last block before the water.

Or ours enough. The exo teams held the corners and the agents were consolidating in the center, and in the open ground on the north side, where the road came in off the shelf, Shepherd and three of the grey suits stood in a ring with their backs to each other.

A dozen Skinwalkers circled the ring.

Skinwalkers in the plural was a sentence I had not expected to think today. They came out of the treeline gaps together, the wrong proportions on every one of them, the lean and the too-long limbs and the sense of a shape that had studied people and misunderstood the assignment, and they moved around the ring in a rotating press, testing it, and in the middle of them stood a Wendigo that made every Wendigo I had ever filed look like a sketch of one. Antlers wider than a car. A frame that would have made a bull moose feel small and then feel eaten. It came at the ring's weak side and one of the exo suits met it chest to chest and the suit gave a full step backward on its hydraulics, and the pilot's voice came over the low-band as a sustained grunt.

Shepherd came off the ring's far side at a speed I still hadn't fully accepted from him.

He went through two Skinwalkers on the way, low strikes at the knee, and reached the Wendigo as it bore down on the suit and hit it in the side of the head with everything the change had given him, and the sound of it crossed the square. The Wendigo's antlers swung. Shepherd was under them before they finished swinging. He drove his shoulder into its chest and it went back into the suit's arms and the suit closed on it, and the other two suits waded into the Skinwalkers with the Division's flamethrower attachments lit.

He'd come down off the shelf. The green flare still hung over Tyssedal, holding, and Shepherd had left the road once the column broke and brought his suits south into the fight that needed them, and he was standing in the middle of a dozen Skinwalkers with a Wendigo the size of a house and he looked, from where I stood, like a man having the best morning of his year.

I turned for the water.

The horn stopped me.

It came from the north the way the Sahara horn had come from under the sand, one long note that started below hearing and climbed into it, and it had a quality this time the desert horn had lacked. Pleasure. Something in the note enjoyed being blown, and the valley walls threw it back, and the ground under the square shuddered once in answer.

The rift opened over the north road.

Not a seam. A door, tall as the smelter stack, its edges tearing wider as I watched, and through it came light of a color the fjord had never held, and through the light came the population of somewhere else.

They had been people. I understood that first, before anything else, because the shapes still held the memory of it. Then the rest arrived. Melted. Faces run like wax and set that way, limbs fused to torsos or to each other, whole crowds of them moving as one shape with a hundred mouths, and among them things that had never been people, quadrupeds and worse, all of it pouring off the rift's lip onto the road and coming down toward the square at a stumbling run. Hundreds. Then more than hundreds. The rift kept giving.

The exo teams on the north corner opened fire. The rounds went in. The mass came on.

Lucifer stood beside me.

He had arrived with no sound and no warning, as he always did, and I had stopped flinching at it sometime in the last ten days. He stood at my shoulder with his hands folded in front of him and he watched the rift give up its cargo with an expression I had seen once before, on the face of a man watching a fire he had warned somebody about.

"You're looking at his hobby." His voice stayed level under the horn's fading note. "The worlds he claimed while you slept. He opened a sky over each one and told them not to fear, and this is what a world becomes when it believes him. He's been keeping them. Now he's spending them."

I let a breath out through my teeth.

"Are we getting help now?"

Lucifer looked at the rift for one second more.

He nodded.

The nod finished, and the air over the north road tore a second time, and what came through it was an eye.

An eye the size of a house, lidless, gold at the iris and burning at the pupil, and six wings folded around it and unfolding as it came, each wing longer than the smelter was tall, and it made no sound at all. It hung over the road for the space of a heartbeat. Then the pupil brightened, and a line of white fire came out of it, and the melted crowd under the line stopped being a crowd. Stopped being anything. The beam walked across the road and the rift's cargo went to vapor in its path, hundreds at a stroke, and the eye turned in the air with all six wings spread and walked the beam back the other way, and the road was empty of everything but a low haze of what had been on it.

It moved to the rift's mouth and stopped there. Wings spread. Eye fixed on the door.

"A seraph." Lucifer, beside me, quietly. "One of the oldest. It will hold that gate, and nothing that comes through will reach the road behind it, and that is the full extent of what the standard permits. Not the host. One guardian for one door." He turned from it. "Azeral opened a way between worlds and spent a claimed population through it. That is no longer Norway's problem. That is every world's. The standard I told you about in your recovery room has been met, and I have made the call, and I will answer for it when there is someone to answer to."

He put his hand on my shoulder plate.

The square went.

Cold rock under my boots. The sound of the square gone, the water at my back, the fjord running black and green-lit in front of me where the shore ring burned, and above the ring, in the base of the cliff, the cave mouth. Black. Wide enough for a truck. Breathing out a slow cold that had nothing to do with Norway.

Lucifer stood beside me and looked at the mouth.

"Remember what we talked about with Isaac."

I remembered. Nine hours before wheels up he had come to my quarters with a stoppered bottle that hurt to look at directly, and Isaac had spent twenty minutes inside the ring feeling out what was in it, and had come back to me with two words. It bites. The bottle sat now in the satchel on my belt with three words written on the side in marker, because Abel had been in the room and Abel could not be stopped.

I nodded.

The silver blade came to my right hand, and the Aegis settled on my left, and I stood at the mouth of the mountain with the two things I trusted.

"I will be waiting for your signal." Lucifer stepped back from me, one pace. "White in the sky. The valley converges. And I come for you, wherever you are by then."

"If I'm under a mountain?"

"Then send it up through the mountain. You'll manage."

He was gone.

I went in.

The tunnel ran down.

Wide at the mouth and narrowing, then widening again, the rock going from Norwegian granite to something older and darker within fifty paces, veined with a green that pulsed faintly in time with the ring burning outside. The cold deepened with each step. The sound of the battle dropped away behind me until the only noise was my boots and my breath inside the helmet and, under both, a slow enormous rhythm that I understood after a hundred paces was something breathing.

The tunnel opened into a chamber the size of a cathedral.

And in the chamber the sin of Gluttony was eating the sin of Envy.

I stopped at the chamber's edge and my body took a step back on its own before I'd decided anything.

Four of them had reached this place. I could read it in the floor. Four Apostles had come down the tunnel ahead of me, fleeing the square, and they had met a fifth here, and the fifth had been waiting. Two lay along the chamber's far wall in the shapes the dead take when they are dropped rather than laid down. A third was a wet outline on the rock. The fourth, the one I took for Envy from the thin greedy build of it, hung by the throat from a hand that had no business being that large, and the thing holding it was drinking.

There was no other word. The Apostle's outline was going into the hand. Light and shape and whatever passed for blood, pulled out through the throat and up the holder's arm, and as it went the holder grew. I watched the shoulders spread. I watched the frame thicken and the head come up, and when the last of Envy went in and the husk dropped to the floor and turned to the same dust as the legion, the thing turned around.

It had been an Apostle once, and it was still an Apostle to about the degree the melted crowds on the north road were still people. The mass of four sins sat in it. Its skin ran with a slow pattern of every color the others had carried, Wrath's scorched stone, Pride's fluid gleam, the rest, all of them moving under the surface of one body that had grown to hold them and was not finished growing. Its face was almost calm.

"Kane." The voice was four voices, stacked. "Think of this as a favor. One Revenant to another."

I kept the Aegis between us and my feet where they were.

"Start making sense. You have about ten seconds before I decide you're the next problem and solve you."

It laughed.

The laugh was the worst part. It went on too long and it climbed too high, four throats' worth of it, and it ended in a sound that was almost weeping, and the thing wiped its eyes with the back of its enormous hand and shook its head.

"Threxiel. You'll want the name for the report. And I am making sense, you simply don't have the context yet, so here." It spread its arms to take in the dead along the wall. "The Seven. Do you know what we were? Lesser angels, once. We fought in the rebellion, and we lost, and we died. And Azeral, who never wastes anything, brought us back with his blood. The same blood in you. The same blood he poured into your Division's little program and its little cryothium and its little men in tanks." It smiled. "That makes us family, Kane. Cousins at least. And I have just killed four of my cousins for you, and drunk what they were, so that you would never have to face them. You're welcome."

"What do you need it for."

"Need?" The smile widened past what a face should permit. "I'm a glutton. It's in the name. I don't need anything. I want." It took a step toward me, and the chamber floor took the step badly. "And I want that boy. The lightning rod. The one with the Conduit in his hands and no idea what it made him. That is a genuinely unique power, Kane, I have never tasted its like, and it is sitting behind a door that stubborn old man has locked, and when I have enough in me to walk through the door I am going to add him to my list of useful tools."

Jay.

The name went through me faster than thought. The kid sitting on the gear crate in the motor pool with his arms pulled in. They're not gonna cut me open, right.

I was moving before the name finished.

The Aegis came up and I went in under Threxiel's reach and the silver blade came across in a flat arc at the height of its left shoulder, and the edge went through the joint clean, as clean as it had gone through Kharos in the sand, and the arm came off.

It hit the floor with a sound like a dropped side of meat. The stump sprayed four colors. Threxiel's face went from smile to nothing to something else in the space of the arm's fall, and before it could finish deciding what, I put the silver blade point-down through the severed arm where it lay.

The blade burned.

Dark purple, first, running up the steel from the point like liquid climbing a wick. Then the purple went to black at its edges and the whole length of the sword caught, purple fire threaded with black, and the arm under it went to nothing, the same nothing the seraph's beam had made of the melted crowds. To nothing. Not dust. Nothing, and a smell of ozone and cold iron, and the fire ran back down the blade into the ring and the ring went so cold it burned my finger through the gauntlet.

*That's new.* Isaac, quiet, a little shaken. *That is very new. Ask me later, I'm still finding out.*

Threxiel came at me one-armed and it was still worse than anything in the Sahara.

It had Wrath's weight behind the swing and Pride's speed inside it, and the first blow drove the Aegis back into my chest hard enough to crack a plate I would have sworn couldn't crack. The second came low and I got the blade into it and the impact ran up my arm and through the new architecture of me and found the old man underneath it and shook him. The third I stepped through and put the blade across its ribs and the purple fire licked out of the wound and Threxiel screamed with four throats and backhanded me across the chamber.

I hit the wall. Stood. Set my feet.

It looked at the wound in its side, where the purple was still crawling at the edges of the cut, and it looked at me, and the smile came back, and it was thinner this time.

"This isn't over. I'll be seeing the boy soon, cousin. Tell him I said hello."

The air where it stood folded and it was gone.

I stood in the chamber with four dead Apostles and my own breath and the slow enormous breathing under all of it.

*Kane.*

"I know."

*I don't think you do. He's going for the door, and the door holds, and none of that is the problem in front of you. The ritual is the problem in front of you. If you don't stop it, the vision happens. Not eventually. Tonight. Every piece of it, in order, exactly as you saw, and the boy's power on a glutton's tongue will be a footnote to it. Get your ass in gear.*

"I know."

I said it out loud, to the dead and the rock, and I went down the main tunnel at a run.

The main tunnel went down for a long time and then it stopped being a tunnel.

The rock opened. One moment there were walls on either side of me and the next there were none, and I came out onto a shelf of stone and stood at the edge of a hole in the world.

The cave system dropped away below me for what looked like miles. Terraces of black rock stepped down into a darkness lit from within by the same green as the shore ring, and the green ran in veins down every face of the stone toward a center point so far below that distance stopped meaning anything and became a kind of weather. The breathing I had followed down the tunnel lived here. It came up out of the pit and moved the air on the shelf like a slow tide.

At the center of the pit lay the head.

A serpent's head. I had been told what slept here and I had not been able to make the telling into a shape, and now the shape lay in front of me and I still could not make it. Half a mile across at the jaw. More. Scales each the size of the exo suits, black-green and ridged, laid over each other in a pattern that went on past what my eye could follow, and the mouth was open, and in the mouth lay the end of a tail thicker than the smelter stack, held there in the jaws, a thing closed on itself for a very long sleep. The eyes were shut. Each lid, if it had opened, would have been three hundred feet across. I did the number and put it down again because it was useless to me.

Three figures stood on a stone platform level with the serpent's brow.

The one in the white robe was chanting. Small next to the other two, red-skinned, horned, ordinary as demons went, and it stood at the platform's edge with both hands raised and a rhythm coming out of it that the green veins in the rock pulsed to. Beside it, watching the chant with its arms folded, stood Azeral, in the armor from the desert, one wing dark and one wing white.

And beside Azeral stood the Herald.

Every alarm I owned went off at once.

I had seen a Herald before. Once. It had come out of the hellscape at the head of the first wave that hit HQ, in the war that had cost us Carter and nearly everything else, and it had taken the whole defense line and Shepherd's arm blade and the better part of an hour to bring it down. A shape with wings that were not wings, and a body of overlapping plates, and a voice that made the tactical net scream. This one stood on the platform in the same silhouette. Smaller. Newer. Its plates had the too-clean look of something made in a hurry.

I went off the shelf.

The drop was sixty feet to the platform and I took the whole thing at a run and hit the Herald in the center of its chest with the Aegis before it had finished turning its head. We went across the platform together and into a stand of stone that came apart around us in a spray of rock, and the rock went flying, and at the edge of my vision Azeral leaned three inches to his left to let a chunk of it the size of a man's head pass his face, and folded his arms again, and watched.

The Herald came up swinging.

It was fast and it was strong and it was nothing. The old me had needed a defense line. The new me put the Aegis into its first strike and turned it, put the silver blade into the seam under its arm and drew the edge out through the front of its chest, and stepped past it while it was still deciding whether it had been killed, and it decided, and dropped, and went to dust in the same green light that lit everything else.

I turned to face Azeral across thirty feet of platform.

"You really need to stop cutting corners on the help."

He tilted his head a fraction, and the white wing caught the green.

"Is all of this necessary, Kane? Genuinely. All the fighting. You came down here to stop a thing you were told to stop, and I am standing here, and neither of us has drawn on the other. We could simply talk."

I bolted.

Straight past him, low, at the robed demon on the platform's edge, and the silver blade came up for the back of its neck at a speed the old body had never owned. The chant held its rhythm. The demon kept both hands raised and both eyes on the serpent.

Azeral was in front of the blade.

He had crossed the distance in the time it took my swing to finish, and he put his open hand into the path of the edge, palm out, unhurried, and the blade met his palm, and stopped.

Effortless. That was the word he was showing me. His face was calm, and the blade sat in his hand, and the whole demonstration was meant to be the Sahara again. The child's toy taken back.

Then his hand bled.

A line of red ran out from under the edge and down his wrist. He looked at it. I looked at it. The chant went on behind him, and the green pulsed, and I let the smile happen because I had earned it.

"You want to be a god. You've been telling whole worlds you're a god. Gods are supposed to be a lot of things, Azeral, and I'm looking at your hand and I don't think 'bleeds like a person' was on the list."

*That's my body he's wearing.* Isaac, fast, sharper than I had ever heard him. *And that's my soul in your hand. It turns out the two of us still recognize each other. He forged the blade to serve him and it doesn't anymore.*

Azeral's face changed.

It went from calm to something with heat in it, and he pulled his hand back off the blade and the wings spread, both of them, dark and white, and he went straight up. Thirty feet. Fifty. He hung in the green light over the serpent's brow and looked at his palm and made a sound in his throat that had no words in it, a sound of pure agitation, an animal noise from a thing that had built its whole existence on never making one.

"How?"

I reached into the satchel on my belt.

The bottle came out into my hand, heavy, and I lobbed it up to him underhand, easy, a beer tossed across a yard. It turned end over end through the green light, and on its side, in Abel's block capitals, the marker read REVENANT STEROIDS.

Azeral caught it.

He read the label. He turned the bottle once in his bleeding hand. And a laugh came out of him, a real one, short and surprised, the first sound I had ever heard from him that had nothing calculated in it.

"That is actually kind of funny."

"Then you're going to love this."

I pressed the button on my belt.

The bottle went off in his hand.

No fire. A crack, a flat percussive sound in the vast air, and then red. A mist of it, thick, spreading from the burst bottle in a slow cloud that took the green light and turned it to something the color of a wound, and the cloud closed over Azeral where he hung, and his wings stopped.

He fell.

Fifty feet, straight down, with the dark wing and the white one both hanging useless, and he hit the platform on his side and the rock cracked under him and he lay there, and the red mist settled over him and into him.

I was already moving.

The robed demon had not stopped chanting through any of it. Its hands stayed raised. Its eyes stayed on the serpent. I came up behind it and put the silver blade down through the top of its skull to the hilt, and the chant stopped in the middle of a syllable, and the green veins in every face of the pit went from pulse to blaze.

The platform exploded.

Purple fire. It came out of the demon's body and out of the rock under it and out of the air, a detonation of the color the blade had burned when it took Threxiel's arm, and it picked me up like a hand and threw me. I crossed a hundred feet of open pit with the fire behind me and hit something that gave.

The serpent's eye.

I hit the closed lid of it, and the lid was three hundred feet of scaled skin and it took my whole body like a mattress takes a dropped child, and I lay against it with the wind gone out of me and the purple fire dying across the pit and the ring burning on my finger.

The ground shook.

I got up slowly. Not from injury. From the thing under my hands. The eyelid moved. A tremor ran through it from one edge to the other, and the whole cavern shook with the tremor, and rock came down from the terraces in slow black curtains, and the breathing that had filled the pit since the tunnel changed its rhythm.

On the platform, Azeral was getting to his feet.

He did it in stages. A hand under him. A knee. The wings dragged and he pulled them in with visible effort, and when he stood his face was the desert face again, the calm one, with something cracked through the middle of it.

"Where." His voice carried across the pit. "Where did you get Wound Fire."

I stepped off the eyelid onto the rock and I gave him nothing.

I ran at him.

The platform was a hundred feet across and I crossed it in the time it took him to raise his hands. The Aegis went into his guard and drove it wide and the silver blade came in over the shield's edge and opened the armor at his shoulder, and I felt it go in. Felt it bite. He turned away from the cut and I followed the turn and put the shield edge into the side of his knee and the knee went, and he caught himself on one hand and I hit the hand with the flat of the blade and the fingers broke, and he made the animal sound again.

*He's right, Lucifer.* Isaac, breathless, if a soul could be breathless. *He was right. The Wound Fire is in him, it's slowing everything he does, and you're doing real damage. Keep on him. Do not let him breathe.*

I did not let him breathe.

He came up under my next swing and drove his elbow into the cracked plate on my chest and the plate went, and the pain was white and enormous and I let it be information and put the blade through the gap in his guard the pain had bought me. It went into his side. He took it. He put his broken hand over the wound and looked at the blood on his fingers and looked at me, and the calm went out of his face entirely, and what was under it was the thing I had fought in Japan and Brazil and the burning mud of every vision, with nothing left over it.

He showed me why he had been the second strongest.

The first blow I never saw. It landed on the Aegis and the shield arm went numb to the shoulder and I was off my feet and moving backward through the air. The second met me before I landed and folded me around it. The third took me by the throat and lifted, wings spread wide and burning at the edges with the red mist still eating at them, and he held me there at arm's length with the serpent's brow behind him and blood running out of three wounds I had given him and he threw me.

I crossed the pit a second time and hit the eye a second time.

And this time when I got up, the eye was moving under me. The whole lid. It slid, slow and vast, and the tremor that had shaken the cavern before came back and stayed, and the terraces above the pit began to shed rock in steady falls, and across the platform Azeral had stopped moving.

He took a step back.

One step, and it was hesitant, and in every fight and every vision and every projection I had never once seen him take a step in that direction.

I turned around.

The eye was open.

Three hundred feet of it. An iris the color of the deep fjord, and a pupil at its center wider than the town of Odda, and the pupil moved. It dilated. It contracted. It found the platform, and the two figures on it, and it focused, and I stood in the regard of a thing older than the mountain we were under and felt it decide that I was something.

"Kane."

Azeral's voice had lost its floor.

"We now officially have a bigger problem than me."

I looked at the eye. I looked at him. My voice came out flat and far away.

"What did you do."

"What did I do." He laughed once, without any humor at all, and pointed his broken hand at the ritual platform, at the dead demon and the blackened stone where the working had been. "That was a binding. It was meant to wake this thing and hold it, in the same breath, so that a hand could rest on it afterward. Mine. You cut the working in half. The waking half was already done, Kane, it had been done for an hour, and the binding half died with the chanter, and now it is awake and no one is holding it. This is a Horseman-level threat. That is not a phrase. That is a classification. Only the four of them can put it back down, and if they cannot, then this world ends tonight and neither of us had to lift a finger."

"You're lying."

I went at him.

"You started the Apocalypse and you're standing there dressing it up as my mistake, and I have listened to every lie you've ever told, in the desert and the ring and every world you touched, and I'm not falling for this one."

He caught the first blow on his forearm and the second on his palm and the third he turned with a twist of his whole body, wings shifting, and I pressed and he gave ground and blocked and dodged, and the eye watched us both, and the rock came down in curtains, and finally he stepped out of my last swing and stood ten feet off with his hands open at his sides.

"If I wanted to start the Apocalypse I would have started it weeks ago. I had ten days while you slept. I opened skies over worlds. Do you think I lacked the means?" His voice cut through the tremor. "I wanted its power. A siphon. A hand on the greatest living thing in creation, so that I could draw on it and guide events toward the destiny you keep pretending you don't believe in. That is what the binding was for. I told you in the recovery room. Fear not. A god says fear not. A god does not end the world he intends to rule."

Ten days. I checked the sentence against them, one by one, the way I would have checked a suspect's alibi, and it held. He had played. He had made no move to end anything, because ending was never what he wanted. He wanted a chain.

I stopped.

The blade came down. My breath came out.

"Then what do we do."

"Become my vessel." Plain, with the same plainness as join me on the grey stone. "Now. Here. Let me in, and the two of us together could stand against that thing long enough to matter."

I laughed. It hurt, through the broken plate.

"Not happening."

He nodded, once, and there was nothing in the nod but acknowledgment.

"It was worth one last try."

He looked up at the eye.

"It's up to the Horsemen now."

He crossed the platform to me faster than the eye could follow and put his hand on my shoulder, and the cavern went.

Cobbles. Cold air. The town.

We stood in the square, Azeral and I, side by side in the middle of everything, and the fighting around us faltered as the two of us appeared. Exo pilots turned in their frames. Agents froze on a reload. An enormous form that had been a Skinwalker's death a moment earlier stood over the corpse with Shepherd's fist still in it and looked at us.

I keyed the low-band before anyone could decide anything.

"All stations. All stations. This is Kane. The ritual is down. The serpent is awake and no one is holding it, and it is coming up. Repeat, Jörmungandr is awake and unbound. Director's contingency three is live. Everyone who can move, move west, wounded first. Strike team holds the square for the withdrawal. And do not look at the mountain when it opens."

I pulled the white flare and fired it straight up.

It climbed, and burst, and hung over Odda like a small cold sun, and every green flare in the valley answered it as the commanders read the code. Ritual down. The valley converges on the strike team, and then the valley leaves.

Azeral hit me in the back of the head.

I went into the cobbles face first. The armor took most of it and my skull took the rest, and I lay there with the square spinning and his boot came down between my shoulder blades and held me.

"Do not mistake what just happened for an alliance."

His voice had its floor back. The smile in it.

"We are still in a fight for destiny, you and I, and I will not be distracted from it by a snake. This world will burn. And before it is done burning I will reach into her chest and take her heart out in front of you, exactly as I showed you, and you will kneel there, exactly as I showed you, because it is what you are for."

I got a hand under me.

He stepped off my back to let me stand, because he wanted to watch me stand, and I stood, groggy, the square still tilting, and I gave him a moment of watching. Then the blade came, and I went.

I blitzed him. That was the only word for the speed. I crossed the square in three strides that were not strides and the silver blade came up under the guard he had not finished raising and went into the armor at the center of his chest and bit deep. Deeper than anything had bitten him. The steel went in past the plate and he made a sound, and his eyes went wide, an honest reaction with nothing arranged behind it, and I dragged the edge sideways and opened the armor from sternum to hip.

He looked down at it.

Abel hit him.

He came in from the side at full sprint with the blue blade raised and threw himself at Azeral bodily, and Azeral, bleeding from the chest, one-handed, took him out of the air and threw him straight up into the night.

Abel went up. A long way up. Then he stopped going up and started coming down.

And a Skinwalker took him out of the sky.

A big one. The wrong proportions, the New Orleans proportions, the one that had flattened him into a car outside Elias's covenant. It came off a rooftop in a flat arc and hit Abel in midair and kicked him, precisely and deliberately, in the groin, and rode him down to the cobbles and pinned him there.

Abel made a sound I will not describe.

The Skinwalker looked at him. Then it stood, and picked him up under the arms and set him on his feet, and bent, and retrieved the blue blade from where it had fallen, and put it in his hand. It nodded at him. One nod. Then it went back up the building it had come off and over the roofline and was gone.

Abel stood in the square holding his sword and his groin, and looked at me.

"I think you two made up."

"I don't know what just happened."

"You made up. That was an apology. Skinwalker apology."

"It kicked me in the—"

Azeral threw me down the road.

He caught me in the back with his good hand and I left the square entirely, cobbles, then air, then the long straight road that ran north out of the town toward the water, and I hit it and rolled and came up on one knee two hundred feet from where I'd been.

He was already coming.

He had a blade.

Black. Not the void-black of the wing or the face. Black like the sky between stars, and inside the blade, moving when he moved it, were stars. Points of light suspended in the steel, drifting, wheeling, and the sight of it went through me with the same cold the crimson blade's weight had carried in New Orleans. He had never drawn it. In Japan, Brazil, the Sahara, the cavern under the mountain, he had never once drawn a weapon of his own.

The first strike came and I got the Aegis into it and the shield rang like a bell and my arm went dead to the shoulder and I went backward off my knee. The second came before I'd landed and I turned my whole body under it and the edge went through the space my neck had occupied and took a piece of the helmet's rim with it.

I got my feet.

He was drawing a blade. He was drawing the blade. Every fight before this he had come with his hands, because his hands had been enough, and now he was bleeding from four wounds and one of his wings hung wrong and he had reached for the thing he'd kept back through all of it.

He was desperate.

Alaric came out of the dark behind him.

He came without a sound, Excalibur in his right hand and his left hand raised, and the fire that came off the left hand was black threaded through with orange, a color I had never seen him make, and he put both hands together around the sword's hilt and the fire ran down the blade and off the point in a single bar and took Azeral in the back.

Azeral screamed.

It was a real scream. He went forward two steps and the star-blade dropped a foot in his grip, and I came in on the drop and put the silver blade into the guard and drove it, and he gave. I pushed. Every step I took he took one backward, toward Alaric and the fire, the Aegis holding his blade off and my edge working the gap in his chest armor wider, and I put my face close to the void of his.

"Was this what you expected? Were you expecting to get backed into a corner in a mining town by a knight and a lab rat? Or did you think we'd stand around and let those visions come to pass?"

He vanished.

He was behind Alaric.

His hand closed on Alaric's throat from behind and lifted, and the black-orange fire went out, and Excalibur dropped from Alaric's hand and rang on the cobbles, and Azeral chuckled. Low. Intimate. He put his mouth close to Alaric's ear.

"You have been one of the biggest thorns in my side since Camelot. Since the very beginning. Every board I set, you were on it, standing in front of the piece I needed." The star-blade came up in his other hand. "And now that all ends."

He drove it at Alaric's chest.

Shepherd and I hit him at the same time from opposite sides.

I had not seen Shepherd coming and neither had Azeral. We arrived in the same instant, my shoulder into his ribs and Shepherd's into his spine, and the blade stopped an inch from Alaric's breastplate, and Azeral left the ground with the two of us wrapped around him and went through the front wall of the nearest building. Brick. Glass. A wooden sign that had said something in Norwegian. All of it came down over the hole where he'd gone in.

The three of us stood in the road.

Alaric had one hand at his throat, rubbing it, and he picked Excalibur up off the cobbles with the other and looked at the building and looked at us.

"What's the over-under on him staying down for the count?"

"Zero."

"Less than that."

The building exploded outward.

Azeral came out of it straight up, wings spread and burning, the star-blade in his hand and blood running off him in the white flare's light, and he climbed a hundred feet over the town and turned to come back down on us.

The mountain opened behind him.

The entire face of it above the fjord. The cliff over the shore ring split from base to summit with a sound that was a sound only in the way an avalanche is a sound, and rock the size of houses came down into the fjord in a wave, and through the split, up out of the cradle and the cave and the miles of black terraced dark, came the head.

Jörmungandr.

It rose past the mountain's shoulder and kept rising. Half a mile of jaw. Scales the size of the suits. The eye, open now, the size of the town, and the tail no longer in its mouth, because the mouth was open, and out of it came a roar that put every sound I had ever heard in a small box and closed the lid. The valley walls answered it. The fjord answered it, the whole black surface of the water jumping as one sheet. My teeth answered it.

Azeral turned in the air.

I have watched him laugh at a bullet through his chest. I have watched him take my blade out of my hand and put it through me. I have watched him hang over a battlefield with an army at his back and smile, and I watched him now turn in the air toward the thing coming out of the mountain, and what was on his face, from the ground, in the flare's light, was terror. Pure. Unarranged.

The Horsemen appeared beside me.

All four. Thor with the hammer's head still smoking. Amaterasu in her red and gold with the curved blade sheathed. Apollo, burning faintly at the edges. Set, wrapped in his bronze. They stood in the road in a line with me at its center, and behind them the valley arrived.

It came because the white flare had asked it to. Exo suits down the north road at a run. Agents in their bounding pairs. Elias and his nine hundred coming out of the treeline gaps at a speed the human eye lost track of, the crimson blade on his back. Abel, walking carefully, who reached me and reported without being asked that Pride had left him in the shovels the second the horn sounded and gone for the treeline, and that he was counting it as a win. Lucifer, from nowhere, standing at Shepherd's shoulder. And Merlin, with his staff and ten days on his face, at the edge of the crowd.

"The door held." Merlin's voice reached me through the roar's dying echo. "Gluttony gave up on it three hours ago and I felt him leave, and I set the seal twice over before I followed. The children are safe. I am here."

Azeral screamed.

Not terror now. Annoyance, enormous, a scream with a curse in it, and he swept the star-blade sideways through the air, and the air tore.

I knew the rift.

I knew it as you know the room where you almost died. The seam forced open from the inside, the flicker of two places through it, the tendrils I had watched wrap Sariveth's torso and drag her off a Brazilian street. The same tear. The same door.

Something came through it.

Sariveth.

She had been Azeral's sister, precise and armored and bored, and she had been dragged into that rift by something with tendrils, and what came out of it now had been through the thing that dragged her. Her wings were still wings. Black tendrils grew out of them and over them and moved on their own, a slow writhing that made her outline crawl. Her face was half the face I remembered. The other half had gone somewhere and been replaced. She hung in the air beside her brother and laughed, and the laugh climbed the way Threxiel's had climbed.

"Everyone." My voice, on the low-band and off it. "Be ready."

"The Wound." Sariveth's eyes were on Azeral, and they were shining. "Brother. The Wound has so many wonders. You should have come with me. You should see what it—"

She looked down at us.

She chuckled.

Amaterasu was behind her.

The Horsewoman of Death had not moved from the line beside me. And she was behind Sariveth in the air, sixty feet up, with the curved blade out of its sheath, and the blade was old past any age I could give it, a sword with a name the world had kept for three thousand years. Kusanagi. It went into Sariveth's back and out through her chest, and Sariveth looked down at the point of it, and the light went out of her, and she fell.

She hit the cobbles beside her brother's blood and stayed there.

Amaterasu turned in the air and put one hand against the rift, and the rift closed, a wound closing under a hand strong enough to hold its edges together, and the last of the tendrils went back into it, and it was gone. And in the silence after it, the word the Horsewoman had used was in all of us. The Wound. Not a rift. A wound, in the world, with things on the other side of it.

Azeral went at her.

The star-blade came up and he crossed the air toward the Horsewoman with the scream still in his mouth, and she was not there. She was on the road beside me, blade sheathed, and Azeral hung over the town alone with his dead sister under him and the serpent rising behind him and his face doing several things at once.

Amaterasu spoke. The first words I had heard from any of them.

"The Revenants and the knight are tasked with him." Her voice was quiet and it went through the whole crowd like a bell. She turned her head toward the mountain, and the thing coming out of it, and then toward Merlin. "The four of us take the old man. The serpent goes back to sleep tonight, or nothing does."

She looked at me once.

Then the Horsemen were gone, and Merlin with them, and the serpent's roar came down the valley a second time, and I stood in the road with the silver blade in my hand and Shepherd on my left and Abel on my right and Alaric with his hand still at his throat, and I looked up at Azeral, and Azeral looked down at the four of us.

The white flare burned out overhead.

Behind him, the mountain kept opening.