other instant in the entire history of the Nine Worlds or Night mattered. This was the moment. Perhaps for Heris and the Instrumentality, both. And she felt the full weight of what will the Instrumentality retained. She should not do this wicked thing. She was Chosen…
Unexpected, sharp pain in her left buttock. She jumped, looked down. Copper winked. “You’re going to shoot, shoot, Son of Man. Left side, then right.”
Heris shoved levers. That hairy-ass runt would be sorry he had done that. She did not look at the Windwalker till the trigger lever slammed home.
The engine lurched violently as the tension in the great bow released. It slammed down again, jarring the air out of Heris’s lungs.
The god’s tongue leapt to meet the shaft of ice. For an instant psychic space filled with dark mockery. The god would brush the projectile aside. Then it would accumulate new Chosen.
The Aelen Kofer shaft had to conform to the physical laws of the middle world, in a part of that world where there was little magic left and the deity had squandered its share already.
The monster toad tongue did deflect the shaft. But that was moving too fast, carrying too much momentum, to be redirected much.
It hit just slightly off bull’s-eye. Otherwise, it performed as designed. It was, after all, an Aelen Kofer artifact.
Dwarves swarmed around the engine, getting it properly aimed again, spanned again, and loaded again. “This one is mostly salt,” Copper told her. “Khor-ben’s idea. I know not what muse moved him. Salt shouldn’t do much. On the other hand, there are iron knives inside the salt. They’ll start spinning when they release.”
Heris watched the shaft go into the tray.
Copper told her, “Left lever first, right lever second.”
“I remember.”
The engine did not buck as violently. The dwarves had seen no need for maximum velocity this time.
As the engine slammed back down Heris saw the other ballista ease into position. It got its first missile off an instant before she launched her third, a long wooden pole filled with thousands of little lead darts, each tipped with a barbed iron or silver head. The lead was expected to separate. The barbed heads were ever so slightly curved. They would not travel in a straight line as they kept creeping through divine flesh.
The wood peeled away while the shaft was in the air. The flechettes hit the Windwalker in a broad spray.
The shaft from the other engine was of the same type.
Thousands of boils and pustules appeared on the skin of the great toad. The god heaved violently, most of its mass clearing the stained and slimy shingle. A scream both physical and psychic froze the assailants. For a half minute Heris was capable of no rational thought at all.
Shaking, she pulled herself together. Downslope, the Windwalker desperately tried to do the same. Its violent heave had caused it to slide. Its leg and tail part were in the water. A sort of gray, foul mist puffed off the god where the darts had gone in.
The scream seemed to have no end.
Working like they were doing so in the face of a high wind and doubled gravity, the Aelen Kofer readied the engine again.
Heris shouted down, “One of you guys want to take a turn?”
Copper bellowed, “We can’t do that. We’re Aelen Kofer. We aren’t allowed. We only make things and explain their use.”
Heris thought that claim emanated from the stern quarters of a male bovine. Aelen Kofer could and did act when they thought they could get away with it. Whatever it might be.
Copper was hedging bets. Lawyering. Making sure he could disclaim responsibility somewhat. Despite having brought a full ration of Aelen Kofer ingenuity to the murder at hand.
Thenceforth the fight was an execution. The Windwalker was too weak. It could do nothing but take the punishment and hope to survive. And hope its enemies could not bring anything more to bear before winter came.
Winter would come. Winter would bring salvation. This coming winter would be the most ferocious in an epoch. This world would not emerge from its next winter.
“Let’s slow down,” Heris said. “Let’s let each shaft finish working before we launch another.”
The mist puffs coming off the Windwalker had become streamers. They built a cloud around the monster. Heris wanted that to clear.
She got down to stretch her legs. “Isn’t that something?” she asked the ascendant. She glanced at the sun. The day was getting on. The light might not last long enough to finish this.
“I don’t feel well,” Asgrimmur said.
“What?”
“I’m sick. I haven’t been sick like this since I suffered through that minor version of what the Windwalker is going through now.”
“But it isn’t happening to you.”
“No. In theory, it’s not. Except to those parts of me connected to the Night. The entire Night is feeling this. It’s confused, frightened, angry, and disoriented. And fully aware that something unprecedented is happening.”
“Your Old Ones, too?”
“Especially them.”
“The other Old Ones?”
“I don’t think so. They’re in a place outside the Nine Worlds and only the Nine Worlds are connected to the Night.”
“Your Old Ones. The rest of the Night. They can’t possibly feel sorry for this thing.”
“The Banished, not so much. The Walker… It isn’t sympathy. It’s fear and all the things the rest of the Night feels. And… No. That doesn’t make sense. Does it? A kind of guilt, despair, then another kind of guilt?”
“Who said the man is confused? That’s clear as a smack in the teeth. Time for me to take a couple more shots.” The steam had cleared off the Windwalker. The mottled, festering remnants of the toad did not retain a third of the mass that had been there before the attack began.
Her first shot set the surface of the Windwalker to bubbling like hot tar. Heris heard the bubbles bursting. Each vented a fat puff of steam. The toad soon disappeared inside another cloud.
Heris leaned back.
The ascendant climbed up and hung on to the side of her seat. “I’ve made sense of what the Walker is feeling. He sees all this as his fault. He now thinks you’ll actually kill the Windwalker. Being selfish, as gods are, he doesn’t care what that means for the Night. He does think that it means you won’t find it necessary to release the other Old Ones.”
“That wouldn’t hurt my feelings. Not having to try. Be pretty damned anticlimactic after all the work we’ve done to make it happen, though.”
“Yes. Just so.”
“What does that mean?”
“That the Walker is sure you won’t let the work go to waste. That, since you don’t need them now, you’ll bring them out to destroy them.”
Heris thought about that. And found it a not unappealing plan. But entirely unnecessary. The Old Ones could be kept forever harmless right where they were.
Asgrimmur said, “The Walker now believes the Old Ones made a huge miscalculation when they conscripted us Andorayans to use against a man who accidentally discovered a way to murder the Instrumentalities of the Night. But didn’t know that till the Night itself made him understand.”
“Yeah. That was a real screwup.”
“And now facts hitherto unnoticed have crept into the Walker’s awareness. It’s possible that the Godslayer himself was misidentified.”
“What?” Heris eased a hand toward one of her knives.
“You were a slave when the Esther’s Wood thing happened. In the Holy Lands. Less than twenty miles away. An imperceptible separation seen from the Great Sky Fortress, centuries earlier. The Walker thinks distance, time,
