decided he would rather die quickly now than experience what that would mean. He could see others thought the same. The surviving Foragers advanced, rifles raised or bayonets fixed. It looked like everyone was ready for a final orgy of violence and death.
Rik stood over the body of Lady Asea. He bent down to inspect her. Bloody as she was, she was still breathing. The Ultari stalked closer now, monstrous legs moving slowly, spiked tails arching scorpion-like above their heads. It was getting much darker now as the pattern faded. Rik’s shadow was enormous. He bent over the sorceress and slapped her face.
“Wake up!” he shouted. “Get up! We need you.”
A rune on her chest started to glow. He touched it and desperately willed her to live, praying to all the gods to aid him. For a long moment nothing happened, then he felt the energy surging through it. He touched it and once again something sparked within him. Power jumped from him to her, strength flowing from him, leaving him weak and dizzy.
Asea sat up gasping for air, like a drowning swimmer pulled from deep water. She shook her head, stared coldly into Rik’s eyes and then rose slowly to her feet, glaring at the Ultari. Her hands flowed through a series of complex ritual gestures. Rik sensed the power answering her call. So did the spider-demons. They began to slowly back away.
No one moved. No one fired. The spider demons withdrew out of sight into the darkness. Asea’s shoulders slumped in weariness. She looked around at the carnage as if wondering what had happened here then she strode over to the pattern to inspect the bodies that remained in the middle of it. Not a word was said.
Rik would have followed her but he noticed Weasel bending down over the Barbarian. Blood soaked his tunic. His wounds did not look good.
Weasel knelt over him. His eyes were wet. “Get up you bastard! You’re too bloody stupid to die!”
Rik half expected the Barbarian to suddenly rise up and tell them it all been a joke but he merely lay there cold and still. An awful sense of appalling absence settled upon Rik. The Barbarian looked gone. The Lieutenant was gone. Gunther was gone too, killed out of Rik’s sight by one of the demons. He had not liked all of them but they had been pillars of his life for years and suddenly those pillars had been kicked away. He felt as if a huge gaping hole had been ripped in the fabric of his life. He wanted to say something to Weasel but found no words. They would not come.
Rik looked away. He saw Sergeant Hef talking to the Lady Asea. The Sergeant was pointing at him, and both of them looked in his direction. Rik remembered Leon and raced back over to him. Perhaps there was something he could do to help.
Leon was dead. He had died alone and in great pain. There was nothing peaceful about his face. Nothing that suggested he had gone to join the angels. Rik closed his eyes, remembering the scared small boy at the Temple Workhouse who had been his first friend. He looked up at the ceiling unable to look at the face and fought down the urge to howl.
Get up, he told himself. Move. You are still alive. You must still get out of here. But the heart had gone out of him, and it took him a long minute to find the strength to rise. When he did, he turned back to the centre of the room, to the fading pattern and the lectern, and he remembered the books that had been the cause of all this. A sudden mad rage filled him and he strode over towards them.
His flesh tingled with residual energies as he entered the pattern and passed the corpse of Bertragh. He paused for a moment to look at the Lieutenant and at Zarahel. The Lieutenant lay face down, his sword hand was a charred mess, white bone peaked through where blackened flesh had peeled away. He had found his death and he had found his glory. Rik wondered what he had been thinking in his last few breaths. Was it all worth it, he wanted to ask. Sardec could have lived a thousand years and now he was a cold corpse. What a waste, Rik thought.
He spat on Zarahel where he lay. The blade protruded from the wizard’s chest. The runes on it still glowed faintly but the metal was all bent out of shape as if warped by the forces that had passed through it when it disrupted the pattern. In places the metal had melted and run. It must have been agony for Zarahel to have that white hot thing buried in his body.
Good, thought Rik. The bastard deserved it.
He looked at the books and slowly a terrible realisation settled on him. There was another bastard here that deserved it. Himself.
If he had not talked Weasel and the Barbarian into sparing these books none of this would have happened. His comrades need not have died. He was responsible for all of this. If he had burned the books when he found them…
He grabbed the books from the lectern and gathered them up in a bundle. He would have set them on fire if he had the means. He turned to look for the lantern and found himself facing Asea. Their gazes met.
“You have held those books before,” she said. It wasn’t a question. How did she know, he wondered? Had he left some psychic residue on the binding or had she plucked the knowledge from his mind or was his guilt somehow written on his face. It did not matter. She knew and if truth be told he did not care. He looked at her with wide empty eyes and said, “Yes.”
She cocked her head to one side and considered him. He knew his fate hung in the balance, and that if he was going to make any sort of plea now was the time to do so. He had no real hope of swaying her but he felt he should do something.
Instead a voice said: “Someone told me once that good and evil fight for control of the universe, and that they are so evenly balanced that we can all make the difference by our slightest thought, word or deed. For good or for evil, we can all make a difference. Is that true? I would like to think it was.”
She looked at him with her cold wise eyes, an odd smile quirked her beautiful lips. “I do not know the answer to your question.”
Disappointment filled him. She was one of the First. She had walked the lands of the immortals and spoken with angels. Surely if anyone knew the answer, she would.
“We are not God,” she said. “We cannot know how she thinks.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“I do not know that either. You heard Yagga speak, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you called me back from the road of death.”
“Maybe.”
“And you killed Zarahel.”
“Yes.”
“What would you do with those books now?”
“Burn them.”
“That would be a waste of something that might be needed in the future. So would giving you to the Inquisition, I think.”
“Do you?”
“You have the power, boy. You were denied schooling. You were denied your birthright. Still you reached for it. It is what the mage-born do. It is like breathing to us. I cannot judge you for that.”
She paused for a moment, and looked directly at him. Rik had seen that look before on the faces of men holding a sword in their hand in a weapon-smiths and trying to decide whether to buy it. She seemed to come to a decision. “I can teach you.”
Rik was stunned. He did not know what to say. All of his life seemed to have been leading to this moment, and now that he had reached it he had no words. He just felt empty.
“Would you like that?”
Was this some cruel joke, a trap, a cat playing with a mouse? He nodded anyway.
“What is your name? I cannot keep calling you boy.”
He considered his answer carefully, recalling all the things that he had been called and the things he did not want to be called anymore.
“Rik,” he said at last.
She glanced at the Foragers who were looking after their dead. The light of the lantern hit her silver mask, and turned her face into that of an enigmatic God. “Then let us leave this place, Rik. We have a long, long way to
