The knife moved in my belly. I honestly couldn’t decide if it would be better to take it out and start bleeding, or if I should leave it in and hope I didn’t cut myself up more while I fought undead warriors. I was pretty certain that either way they weren’t going to give me the time to heal myself. This was not a three-second repair job, not any more than rewelding a torn door or hood would be a quick fix.
I pulled the knife out before I let myself think about it anymore. While I was doing that, I realized I wasn’t wearing my Kevlar vest anymore. Not that it mattered: it was meant to stop bullets, not knives. Edged weapons had a whole different manner of entry. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing I should’ve lost. Redding must’ve taken it off me before suspending me over the cauldron. I hoped I was right about zombies not using guns.
Focusing on the missing vest in no way stopped the world turning white and spinning violently. I supposed it always did the latter, but I wasn’t usually intimately aware of it. I couldn’t clear my vision, so I reached for the Sight, and found it more fragile and uncertain than I was accustomed to. Still, it gave me shadows, and that was more than I could see with my normal eyes.
Redding’s face was split in another of those saintly smiles. He gave me an encouraging nod: encouraging me to die, I imagined, so he could throw me in the cauldron. His bodyguards didn’t look happy, though I wasn’t sure what happy looked like on a dead man. My five warriors were still standing there, though they’d lifted their swords now, and I was pretty sure I could either start fighting or just get cut down.
Fighting seemed better. I was Inigo Montoya. I wasn’t going to let my guts spill out on the ground while the six-fingered man got away. I stuffed my left hand against my belly, admiring how the world swam red, and raised the rapier with my right. It wobbled, but at least it offered some kind of defense. I wished I had a wall to lean against, but I didn’t think the swimming pool would suddenly become a solid vertical surface at my whim.
The cauldron warriors moved in, and did it like bats out of hell. None of this sluggish-zombie routine for them, oh no. They could move fast enough to keep me from falling into the cauldron, and they could sure as hell move fast enough to look like emaciated death swooping down on me. A sword glittered in my Sight, cutting the air on its way to doing the same to my neck. I made an absolutely pathetic parry and silver skittered away. A tiny wellspring of hope opened in my chest. Maybe I could beat them after all.
A much larger wellspring of blood opened in my left shoulder as one of the others drove his sword into it. A raw yell that was more surprise than pain tore my throat, and red film poured through my vision, blocking out the Sight. The pain in my gut faded, and my nerves never got a chance to tell me how much the wound in my shoulder hurt.
Glorious, savage power rushed into me like I was drawing it from the earth. My eyes cleared, though everything remained tainted a dangerous crimson. I whipped around, totally uncaring that I was exposing my back to half the undead soldiers, and shoved my rapier hilt deep into the one who’d stuck my shoulder. His jaw dropped open in a fair impression of astonishment, and I jerked upward with my sword, severing the monster’s breastbone and continuing toward the sky.
I did not have the strength to do that. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got decent upper-body strength from working on cars, and I had a noticeable height advantage over the undead guy. Moreover, his bones were probably a little fragile, since death wasn’t usually good for structural integrity. And the rapier, while basically a stabbing weapon, did have an edged blade all the way to the crossguard. Still, these things did not make for splitting a body from the sternum up.
It felt
My opponent gave me a rictus of a grin in return, undead gaze flickering over my shoulder in a classic feint. I swept my blade around, knocking his aside, recovered from my lunge and flung my left hand behind me to catch an oncoming blow with my palm. It hurt. It
I hissed and decided the risk of using magic as a deliberate weapon was worth it just then. My sword burned with righteous healing power that meant a quick end to the zombie warriors, and showed no signs of petering. Maybe the magic just hadn’t liked being used against a god. Or maybe I was about to make the last mistake of my life, but at least it’d be a good show.
The first soldier hadn’t been disarmed, just knocked off balance. He came at me again. I ducked under his sword—no mean trick, given I had at least six inches on the guy—and came up inside his guard for another through-the-sternum hit. He exploded. I jerked around, raising my useless left hand and calling power that burst from my palm tinted red with rage.
My third opponent flew back across the swimming pool, into a hedge, and lit on fire. Interestingly—even in the blur of action and anger that propelled me, it was interesting—only he burned, not the sticky black branches that held him. And the silver-white magic filling me didn’t burn away or leave me exhausted. It seemed there were things I could throw it at without suffering ill effects myself.
The last two of my set came at me from opposite sides. I ducked and swung around behind the one to my right, nailing him in the neck as he collided with his friend. It looked very Three Stooges, right up to and including my sword sticking in the one’s spinal cord. Gooey flesh burned away under the blade’s healing power, but not fast enough for me to shake it loose, even with the preternatural strength that washed through my veins. I howled frustration and let the sword go as the fifth and final of my attackers ran at me. My plan, such as it was, was to let him run the sword through me and throttle him when he tried to pull it out, but my body was smarter than my brain. At the last possible instant I took a small step to the side and thrust my arm in front of his chest, clotheslining him.
He went down with a surfeit of grace, sword flying in an elegant arc as his arms lifted toward the sky. I pounced on him, grabbed his throat with my one good hand and poured healing power into his desiccated shell. Like his brothers, he simply exploded, spattering bits of dried-up viscera all over the yard. I could get to like that. Triumphant, I jumped to my feet, snatched up my sword—and toppled as the entire world came rushing in at my head like a planet-bashing asteroid.
I stuffed the rapier into the ground so I had something to lean on. There were body parts all around me, black and smoking with their severed ends glowing silver-blue. Pride, and then mind-boggling agony, bloomed in my chest. I fumbled my utterly useless left hand toward the hole in my shoulder, which was way too much to ask of my injured body. I tried for the other hole, the one in my gut, and couldn’t manage that, either. Stymied, I dropped to my knees, right hand wrapped around the rapier’s pommel, and looked up.
I’d thought berserker rages were supposed to ignore all injury and wait until the battle was over to give way to hurting. Apparently mine hadn’t gone to Berserker Rage Finishing School, because I had nothing, not one single goddamn thing, left. I couldn’t even muster up a whimper: it took too much energy. Blasting Cernunnos had wiped me out, too. Maybe I was paying for using healing magic offensively, after all.
On the other hand, maybe I was just paying for having a bunch of holes in my previously unperforated body. My left hand was doing something worse than throbbing. Hot wetness drained from it without any particular surcease or increase as accorded by the beat of my heart. Blood leaked from my shoulder, too, a semi- enthusiastic drizzle that I doubted could keep up the enthusiasm much longer. Finding out what my belly was doing meant looking down. I was reasonably certain I would never look up again if I did that, so I kept my gaze resolutely fixed on Redding and his bodyguards.
The latter four stepped away from Redding and moved toward me, loosening their swords in their sheathes. A groan tried to break free, but gave it up as a bad job somewhere around my esophagus. If I didn’t have the energy to groan, I was pretty sure I didn’t have the strength to fight off four more undead warriors. I set my teeth together carefully, mimicry of a clenched jaw that I hoped would inspire resolution within me.
It didn’t, really. It didn’t even inspire a rally of healing magic, which was apparently as exhausted as I was. I held on to my sword, dug deep in my gut for power, and took the one choice I thought still lay open to me.
I waited until they were close enough to flash-fry with my shields, and let loose with everything I had left.
Magic made the
