Kill!

  Thus his Lady commanded. She had whispered to him in the long nights, always parted from him by a shimmering veil of darkness. Although, he had come to learn that she was the darkness, not what lay behind it. Eresh had taken the burden of the shadow-world, of horrors and disasters. But it was only through her that change and growth were possible.

  The Daimons, she had whispered. They gather in force. They move openly now at the behest of their new master, the Daimoniac. You must face them, Xarl. Lead the Furies. Become my champion.

  Magic had been born within him. It was not his, not truly. It belonged to Eresh, but she had given it to him to wield, to channel, until his mission was complete.

  He longed to kill Telos, the man who had stolen his sword. But the goddess had expressly forbidden it. And so Xarl released his frustration upon the Daimons, bending the malignant host of insects and ruin to his will, unleashing them in a torrent of pure decay.

  The Daimon before him shrieked, withered. It tried to fight them, but the insects were as numerous as stars, black stars, with pulsing stingers and mandibles that chewed. They were the perfect tool to destroy Daimons, for they devoured down to the last scrap, the last atom.

  Within seconds, the Daimon was reaved of its flesh, bare muscle exposed that roiled with the energies of change. Then it was a skeleton, its arcane bones falling to the earth to become another fossil, another relic.

  It was strange to think of the beings before him leaving anything behind, so amorphous were they. But he supposed the infinite variety of Daimonic fossils attested to the many shapes they had worn the moment before their obliteration: giants of men, reptilian monstrosities, birdlike angels, and slithering worms. All bore the same makeup, the same essence, but their shapes were as numerous as stars.

  But this time, we shall grind them to dust. This time we shall not leave your bones to rot in the earth, Xarl thought. This time, there shall be nothing left.

  He stamped on the bones as he advanced, implacable as the turning of the earth. Two smaller Daimons leapt at him. He caught one in his hand. He lifted it from the ground. It squealed and writhed in his iron hard grip—the grip of one who had held men and women in their death-spasms down on the torturer’s rack—trying to slough its skin. He opened his mouth and a torrent of pure disease poured forth, eradicating it in a liquid cloud of fester.

  The second one was tearing into him, rending him with scythes and talons, but no sooner than the wounds opened they shut.

  An anomaly, the Dark Lady said. Yes, he had always known he was special. None of the few theronts he had met bore his special regenerative powers. If he had harboured the same ambition as his former master, Lucan, he might have made himself the king of theronts. But Xarl had never cared for such things. Even now, he was content to be the champion and emissary of the god, not a god himself.

  He discarded the husk of what had once been a Daimon and turned upon the one goring into his treetrunk legs. He raised his fist and smashed downward. The force of his blow was god-inspired. Exoskeletal armour gave way beneath the purity of rage. Black blood and organs of enigmatic purpose spilled from the wound. Still, it fought. Xarl turned his black breath upon it, and the insects of Memory’s hellish atmosphere began their relentless assault.

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  He left the Daimon writhing.

  The Furies fought beside him. Their arrows, forged by Eresh, were bane to the Daimons. How they despised Nilldoranian steel! The very earth of the Godshome was intolerable. Xarl could only wonder at the harshness of that planet that its soil and ore could unmake Daimonic power.

  The insect cloud followed him. Its penumbra was illuminated by the flash of bright arrows and the ululations of the Furies. He found some of the warrior-women dead, the blood drained from them, only husks remaining. Through the cloud of translucent wings and black thoraxes he saw a Daimon repairing itself, flesh sprouting and flowing over the ruined exposure of bone. He sent his minions forth; the Daimon vanished beneath the quivering mass.

  A Fury wrestled with a Daimon, cutting at it with her newly made knife. Each slash was accompanied by a shout that pierced the air. The Daimon’s wounds glowed golden, as though it were metal drawn from the smithy-forge. Pieces of it slopped onto the ground. Its crablike forelimbs darted out, but the Furies were too nimble for such clumsy attacks.

  We are winning, Xarl thought. The Daimons cannot stop us. We are death’s emissaries Herself.

  But then darkness fell upon him. At first, he wondered if it were a cloud, or perhaps even the sky-ship of Eresh, descending to view the scene of victory. But then he saw the Daimon—taller than any tree, taller than Lucan’s arrogant towers, tall as some hills. All chitin, it was. Black flesh knitted together armoured plates thicker than the hull of a galleon. Its face was a cockroaches, though gifted with three independent tongues that darted and flashed, skewering Furies and drawing them up into its abysmal, clicking maw—there to be subsumed utterly.

  He sent his cloud of insects forth. But where they could devour and shred the flesh of the lesser Daimons, this ancient behemoth weathered their attack like a cliff-face. It drew in a breath clagged with blood, then sprayed forth a gust of pearlescent liquid.

  Acid.

  The insects melted, tumbling from the sky like black rain. Xarl grimaced as speckles of acid kissed his skin, dissolving it. He felt his own flesh running off him in rivulets. The pain was exquisite, but it was soon answered by the itching sensation of his body repairing itself.

  He snarled.

  The Daimon advanced, its insectoid legs boring six foot deep holes in the earth as they struck down. Furies peppered its underbelly with gleaming arrows, but they were no more effective than the insects. It spewed forth its ghastly mist again and Furies died screaming, the skulls showing through the vapour-thin remains of flesh.

  Xarl stood alone.

  The thing stared down at him with eyes that had’d seen the dawning of the world. It was a god, in its own way. A monstrous god. An effigy to darkness and change and life. He bore a kinship with this horror.

  But he also bore something else. An image, like a holy relic concealed in the garment of a fugitive. It was an image of the Dark Veil Lady. An image of the face of divinity. A face that could not be described in the words of their common tongue, perhaps not even in the language of the gods. Yes, her face was his icon, his symbol. It was, he knew, the image of his own soul. Tainted and yet beatific. Broken and yet blessed.

  Eresh had saved him from the horror that he was. She had recognised his monstrosity not as sin but as misdirected purpose. The deeds he had performed, the ugliness of his form, all were made anew beneath her gaze.

  He stared into the Daimon’s eyes—the eyes of certain death. Of consumption. Of utter destruction of the self. But what he summoned instead within himself were the eyes of Ereshkigal, the Goddess of the Sickle, the Shaper of Flesh, the Muse of Transformation.

  Alone, Xarl stood before the terror. He stooped and found a discarded spear, its point still gleaming with Nilldoranian steel.

  The titan-Daimon sucked in a hideous breath, and he knew what would come next.

  Crying the name of the goddess, dauntless of his imminent death, he lifted the spear—and threw.