It used not to be part of him in the chains.
Aldric recalled how they used to be nothing but weapons hell forged weapons, a gift of a god whom he believed in. They themselves had been put into the hands of Vharos himself, during the great crusade, the voice of the God of the War, like the grinding of mountains: Cleanse the corrupted in my name.
Now the chains were his hands.
His bones had been fused together, wrapped round sinew, coming out of his forearms like black iron veins. He even could not take them out. He'd tried. Three years earlier, he had stabbed his left arm with a dagger in one of his weakest moments that he hates to remember. Attempted to excavate one of the links.
The dagger broke.
The chains didn't.
There was an old ash and new death smell in the village.
Aldric was huddling in a place where there was a smithy, but now the roof was down, and the walls remained only sketches of charcoal. He looked through the opening in which the door had formerly been suspended, and saw the procession of divinity turn winding up the mountain-path.
Twelve knights in gold plate. Completely ornamented armor, shining to the eye. They proceeded in perfect order around a litter in the middle of which were four acolytes. Lying there, on that litter, wrapped in velvet with a sickly white light: the Fingerbone of Saint Vellix.
Some minor saint. Some minor relic. A tooth-pick left by some minor god.
Didn't matter. It bled divinity. That was enough.
The snow of white dust, flaking off the skin of Aldric on one side as he shifted weight, never ceasing, never dried away. His wife's ashes. His son's. Combusted into each pore when the illusion burst and he knew what he had done.
His forearms are stirred by the chains. Always they did where divine energy was near. Not hunger, exactly. More like... recognition. Like wolves scenting wolves.
His left eye flickered. A dim blue light flowed into his eyes names, distances, the violent clink of the divine power of the priest, which was hovering around his head like a second crown. The Blessed Eye Fragment. The gift of Thorne, were you to call the gift ripping it out of the skull of a dying man.
The blue had died, and Aldric blinking.
Showtime.
He didn't announce himself.
Did not fall out of the trees with a war cry, did not get into the path and demands. Then there was a point where the marching passed through the mountain pass, arrogant and lethargic, blind with their self righteousness. The second, a figure came down in the midst of them.
The knights responded speedily disciplined, trained. Spears turned front, levelled. Rear rank fell round the litter. The priest started chanting.
The chains of Aldric were in motion before respiration was possible.
They sprang out of his forearms as living creatures, black steel bound in red-runes. Down three knights at the same time chains round their throats, round their waist, round their weapon arms. One jerk and they crashed together with a crash of metal on metal. They didn't get up.
It was a scream of chanting on the part of the priest. "Protect the relic! Protect "
A chain hooked his ankle. He fell face down, yardstick cushion, the Fingerbone rolling and rolling.
Before it fell on soil Aldric took it.
The rest of the knights were indecisive. He could tell them doing the calculation a dozen of them, three already fallen, the target with their sacred item in his hand as though it was nothing. His chains were floating around his head like points at their faces.
No one moved.
Aldric glanced down at the chain tangled priest, who was still breathing. Mid forties. Soft hands. The type who never took up arms, only practised rituals and gathered tithes.
He could kill him. It would be easy.
He never did. Not mortals. Only gods.
The chain released. The priest scrambled away, with his ankle, his eyes opened.
Aldric turned and walked away.
One of the knights discovered his voice behind him. You you can not that you see that is a relic a holy one
Aldric kept walking.
It is the property of the Divine Crown! The gods will "
He stopped. Looked over his shoulder. Just once.
The mouth of the knight clamped together.
Aldric walked into the trees.
A hundred yards into the woods the Fingerbone shattered in his hand.
Not torn drawn to pieces, as it were, of sand and wind. White dust blew about his palm, and then swept toward him, and tunneled into his flesh like grubbing worms. He experienced it going up his arm, to his elbow, to his shoulder.
Then the pain hit.
It wasn't new. Every relic did this. Having known did not make it any easier. Fire burned up his veins, white blooded, voracious. His vision whited out. His legs dropped, struck moss and rock. The chains trembled, shaking at one another as his arms jerked.
Birds flew off the trees somewhere above.
The pain peaked. Held. Then slowly, like a wave, withdrew on land.
Aldric opened his eyes.
New cracks were glowing faintly white at the back of his right hand. In a couple of hours they would die to grayness, and dissolve in the crowd. But in a way they throbbed with stolen divinity.
He flexed his fingers. Stronger. Faster. The knowledge that had become relic was lodged in his bones an incidental advantage of permanence, a negative response to heat. Nothing dramatic. Enough to count in a battle.
Suffice enough to get the next god bleeding.
He leaned himself up and continued to walk.
The lengthening of the trees faded into a gap. The river ran through the middle, cold and swift with the melting of the snow of the mountains. Aldric was on his knees, taking the water with the good hand the one that was not the one that had just been inside-out and drinking it.
The water tasted like iron. Everything did, these days.
Behind him, a twig snapped.
He didn't turn. Just kept drinking.
"You know I'm here." A woman's voice. Low, smooth, with a sharpness that is like rust.
Aldric rose slowly. Turned.
She was in the thicket, perhaps half a dozen feet off. Tall almost his height charged with dark robes which had swallowed the evening light. Black velvet draped with rags of midnight blue, high rifts on the sides exposing leather shoes and fair flesh. Her hair was long black, straight down her lower back, unbound, and heavy like a curtain.
She held a heavy book in her hands bound up in what appeared to be human leather. Its cover had chains hanging on it. It whispered. Mystic, watery, half drowned voices.
Her eyes glowed violet.
"Artemis Reed," she said. Something should be meant by that.
It didn't.
It is three days to the north of the temple of the Grave Titan. She moved nearer, and her feet were putting up moss. You shall want my barriers to live through.
Aldric studied her. Mage, obviously. Outlawed magic The chains on the grimoire made her outlawed in all the kingdoms which still bowed themselves down to deities. Young, perhaps in her middle twenties but her eyes had depth. The type of weight that was a result of watching things burn.
She looked up at him and did not flinch. Most people didn't.
"How do you know me?" he asked.
"I've been watching." It was just, as she said it was not a threat. Thou hast killed Thorne three weeks ago. Happy Knight of the heavenly Crown. First great human foe you have killed. You killed a dozen inferior divine beasts in half a year before that. And then you had spent two years in pursuit of little clergy with blessed relics.
She knew. All of it.
"You move north," she continued. "Always north. Towards the ancient shrines, and towards the hills, and towards the spots where the deities keep away their most ancient toys. You don't talk to anyone. You don't take shelter. You don't stop."
Aldric said nothing.
The Grave Titan is the first actual guardian. She tapped her grimoire. The whispering intensified. Fifty feet of Godly marble, beaten ten thousand years ago, re formed to slay whatever that has ever dared to attack the Gates of Elysium. It's killed thousands. Rebels, blessed knights, crusaders. Even some inferior deities who had come out of place.
She paused.
"You'll die without me."
The chains moved on the skin of Aldric. Not threat just awareness. He could even murder her before she even completed her next term. Probably. Mages were unpredictable. Forbidden mages more so.
But she'd come to him. Found him. Knew his path.
That meant something.
Walk and talk, and turn north, he said, and turned north.
Artemis twitched his lips behind his back. Not quite a smile. Then she followed.
Both were devoured by the forest.
Three hours after, they camped in a cave half concealed by pine blown down.
Aldric sat with his back to the wall with chains across his knees and gazing at the entrance. Artemis was sitting opposite him, open grimoire by the dim purple light. Whispering no longer, there were still here and there murmurs breaking through the pages, words in languages which had colder air than words in English.
It does not just fight, I said, not looking up, The Grave Titan. It adapts. carve it with a knife, and it will come up armoured where you made it. Light it on fire, and it becomes fire resistant. Attempt to exhaust it, and it devises the plan of exhausting you in return.
Aldric waited.
It can really only be wounded by relic weapons. But you see you have known that you have been gathering them. She glanced up. "How many now?"
He thought about it. "Five."
"The chains, obviously. The work of Vharos I can tell the forging. The eye, of Thorne I heard you stole it. The Titan Core Fragment of She halted. Frowned. You are not the Grave Titan killer. That is to say... you killed somebody. Something with a stone heart."
Aldric said nothing.
"The Hound of Judgment." Her voice sharpened. Two weeks ago, a divine beast had disappeared on the eastern pilgrimage path. The gods dispatched it to kill somebody. It never came back."
"I didn't kill it." Aldric's voice was flat. "It died on its own."
Artemis stared at him. Then slowly she shut her grimoire. The whispering came to a complete halt.
"You absorbed it anyway. Although you had not struck the fatal blow. She shook her head. That is not the way relic absorption is to be done. You are not robbing power you are attracting power. The higher power arrives to you. Wants to be absorbed."
She leaned forward. "What are you, exactly?"
Aldric looked at her. His eyes were shadows even in the dim light.
"Cursed."
Silence stretched.
Artemis broke it first. "The gods are watching you now. You know that, right?"
He nodded. He had experienced it the burden of the eyes of God, as of crawling insects on his flesh. When he killed Thorne they had noticed. Noted as he stole the Hound. Now, with the Fingerbone? They were placing bets.
I was raised in a village, which learned forbidden magic. Artemis no longer spoke her voice was lower and rougher. "Not for power. For protection. We were starving under the tithes of the gods. The blessings they bestowed were not free of a fee. So we looked elsewhere."
She pulled back her sleeve. On her arm she had scars of burns--old, white, scaly.
When I was fourteen the crusaders of the war god came. The attack was blessed by Vharos himself I saw him looking on with the rest of them, and laughing at their laughing. She rolled the sleeve down. I was saved as my mother took me and dropped me in a well and covered it with a rock. I clawed out three days later. They were all dead."
Aldric didn't move. Didn't speak.
I thought: at last, when I heard of you the knight who slew his own family through a false illusion of God, then began to climb heaven. Artemis met his eyes. "Someone who understands."
The chains stirred. Not aggression. Something else.
I do not want to understand, Aldric said.
"I know." She drew her grimoire back in her lap. "You want extinction. So do I."
Dawn came gray and cold.
Aldric was at the entrance of the cave already, observing the treeline. Artemis was quiet in packing, she was as swift and smooth as a years-long journey.
Looking up at the mountains, she said, and came with him. "Three days if we push. Two if we don't sleep."
"We don't sleep."
She nodded as she would have expected to. The Titan will be aware of our approach. It is allied to the pantheon all gods will be spectators of the fight. If you win, they'll panic. If you lose "
"I won't lose."
Artemis looked at him. Ash shook the dust off his shoulders and his hair and the cracks in his armour. His chains were suspended as dead, but she saw them come to life and were hungry beneath the flesh.
"No," she said quietly. "I don't think you will."
They walked into the forest.
Something watched them, high up in the clouds, behind them. Something that had six wings and molten golden eyes.
Seraphion, the Right Hand of Heaven, made their way and headed to the throne.