lights gleaming upon its banks.
As he flies unerringly towards the vast lake in the darkness, he picks out main streets, town squares, winding highways, clock towers, restaurants, cafes, villas, jetties, pontoons, sailboats and cruisers and casually sets fire to them all. The lakeside is soon surrounded by a wall of flames reaching high into the night sky and sirens quickly fill the air, the lights of emergency vehicles wind up the twisting roads into the foothills, people spill out into the streets, into the gardens of their homes, to see the skies lit such an unnatural, incandescent red. Red laced with a blue so pale it is almost white.
Holy fire.
Except it can’t be holy fire because these people are not our enemies. They have done nothing to deserve our wrath. How could anyone even justify using it this way?
It’s the dead-heart of winter, with everyone inside away from the cold. Maximum damage, minimum effort. The loss of life would be terrible, if this were not a dream.
Luc continues, following the main body of the waterway until it splits into two tributaries. He chooses the right fork, flames rising in his wake along the right bank.
Through his eyes, I look back at each town or village that has been claimed by fire, feeling both exultation and nausea, his emotions still weirdly entangled with mine. I can’t understand how this is happening — how I can see what he sees, feel him, be him.
I know our connection is strongest while I lie sleeping, but this is something else altogether. Luc has always been so guarded, so unknowable. But tonight, I think I’m actually inside his mind, or what my sleeping self imagines his mind is like. And what I’m seeing there is utterly repellent.
When I knew him — when he and I lay entwined beneath the fragrant boughs in that hanging garden he created solely for me — I could never have imagined him capable of any of this.
This Luc? I don’t even know.
I’m so busy looking backwards at the devastation Luc has wrought that I don’t see her until she is upon me, us, with a rush of air, of silent fury. I am buffeted by her wings, the giant wings that are unfurled across her back like a warning of the terror to come.
I know those dark eyes, that wavy hair, that face that is as familiar to me — and as dear to me, I realise — as my own face. My true face. It’s Nuriel.
She’s moving so quickly that I only catch a glimpse of her. Her wide eyes are dark with anger as she cries in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘You may go no further, Luc. No further.’
She seems to draw a flaming sword out of nowhere, out of thin air, it’s suddenly just there in her hand, and she’s suspended in the air before him — before me, the ghost in the machine — with contempt and righteous anger in her eyes.
She’s more beautiful than the sun, and completely terrifying. Every part of her seems made of electricity, or lightning; the locks of her dark, wavy hair snake out around her face as if she has suddenly turned into that gorgon of myth, the Medusa. I can’t reconcile the gentle, playful creature who was my friend with this vision of terror and beauty. She seems ready to slay Luc, or die trying.
Luc laughs again, hatred in his voice as he replies, ‘I was the highest of you all. You were nothing before, never my match! Why dare hope that you could stop me now?’
‘I’m only the first line of defence,’ she tells him fiercely. ‘Even if I am defeated, they gather to end your misrule.’
‘If they believe you will buy them all enough time to reach Milan, their confidence is misplaced,’ Luc sneers.
Suddenly, the air before him — before me — seems to displace with the heat of a thousand suns. The air itself bursts into flame and there’s a flaming sword in Luc’s hand — in mine — and there are giant wings flaring across his back — as if they are mine, too — and Luc rises into the air and falls upon Nuriel without warning, sword upraised.
I scream at her: Fuge! Flee!
But my cry is silent, and goes unheard, and Luc slashes down without hesitation, his burning blade driving at a point between her right earlobe and her jawline. He follows the blow swiftly with all his weight, as if he would strike Nuriel’s head from her neck in one blow.
She was his friend once, too, a long time ago. But there’s no glimmer of past affection. Certainly, no mercy.
It’s true that her strength did not ever equal his, because I glimpse genuine fear in Nuriel’s eyes as she brings up her own blade, clumsily, just in time, so that the two cutting surfaces meet with a crack of energy at impact, like a lightning strike. Her blade is caught at an awkward angle between their two bodies.
Luc and Nuriel grapple together, their blades locked for what seems an eternity, spinning and falling through the air in a dance both graceful and deadly. And the whole time, I’m completely disorientated, because it feels as if it’s me fighting Nuriel.
The cold air whistles past us as we fall and tumble through the icy winter air, the whole world red with flame at the peripheries of my sight. Nuriel’s eyes bore into mine with contempt, with barely concealed terror, and she bares her teeth against me, crying, ‘Haereticum!’
Heretic. The word causes a little catch in my breathing. What could she mean?
Luc drives down inexorably upon Nuriel’s blade, pushing it in towards the sweet curve of her face. I sense her beginning to falter as he bears down upon her with all his ferocity.
‘If they are all as weak as you,’ he hisses, eye to burning eye, ‘then your rule is truly over and mine? Begins now. I ascend even as you fall.’
He roars the last word, and the light of his blade seems to leach into the light of Nuriel’s. His blade is beginning to cut through. In seconds, she will be dead, her energies scattered.
But I know Nuriel.
And even before my eye catches her doing it, I sense her flow away from the point of weakness, the breach, until almost the only thing left of her is her broken blade, and then that, too, unravels and dissolves. Nuriel has become a slipstream of particles so fine and luminescent, Luc can’t hope to catch it or bend it to his will.
I watch as the particles disperse then re-form some distance away — like a swarm of bees coming together. And I see Nuriel again, in her customary form, her giant wings outspread, her hands empty of any weapon. Then she seems to somersault backwards, spiralling down gracefully, deliberately, with the velocity of a speeding arrow, towards the slick, dark surface of the lake far below.
Her feint has caught Luc by surprise, and she’s already pulled herself into a low, tight, skimming trajectory just above the waterline — moving away quickly, faster than a mortal eye could follow — well before he subsumes his own burning weapon in the palm of his hand and turns to follow.
Nuriel streaks past a large estate by the water’s edge — red light reflecting weirdly upon a small guesthouse and private pier on the lake’s edge — well before Luc has even completed his own dive.
Nuriel is picking up speed ahead of us; she’s now only a faint, luminous streak almost lost to sight in the reflected glow of red upon the water. Luc laughs again as he launches himself after her like a bird of prey, vengeance singing in his heart. The two of them are locked in pursuit, tearing over the water, weaving their way through and around islands both inhabited and uninhabited, exploding through outbuildings, ferry terminals, church towers, gateways, boundary walls, leaving only incandescence in their wake.
Luc goes after Nuriel without hesitation as she counted upon him doing. She’s leading him somewhere. Somewhere with reinforcements. At least, she’s trying to.
She may not be his equal in strength or ferocity, but when I knew her, there were few fleeter in mind, in spirit, than Nuriel.
And it hits me, that this isn’t a dream.
This is real. It’s happening. Happening right now.
Luc has reached the outskirts of the city. He’s almost here.
15
