Surrender to the Will of the Night - By Glen Cook Page 0,226

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, and coincidence might have resulted in picking the wrong Godslayer.”

“Horse hockey.” And muttered something about keeping it in the family.

“You’re in the process of killing what, once upon a time, was the most terrible Instrumentality of all. A weakened Kharoulke but the real thing, not some ghost of a god raised up by a lunatic sorcerer with a lust for immortality. And you have it in your power to extinguish an entire pantheon and one of the Nine Worlds.”

“More horse puckey, Asgrimmur. Get down. Time for another shot.”

Shafts from both engines struck the Windwalker. God flesh surged violently but did not come down in the water this time.

The violence continued, as though the god’s back had been broken.

Asgrimmur swore. “Oh, shit! Get down from there, Heris.”

Copper snarled, “Down, woman! Down!” He and his people started crawling under the nearest chunks of basalt.

Heris felt the imminence. She dropped between skittering rocks, turned an ankle, made cover with an instant to spare.

A blinding flash. A roar that overshadowed all the firepowder roars Heris ever heard. The earth shook, rattled, and bucked. Scree slipped. Boulders went bounding or sliding downslope. Somebody shrieked as his hiding place fell in on him. For an instant the air was too hot to breathe. Then a ferocious wind came rushing downhill.

A massive fireball climbed toward and tore into the low overcast.

“Well,” Heris muttered. “This is what Piper saw when the god worm died. Damn! Good thing the old asshole was worn down to where he didn’t have anything left.”

She could not hear herself. Nor anything else. Just as well. Her companions did not need to follow her ramblings.

She did review what Piper had said about the incident with the god worm.

An egg. There should be some kind of egg. Piper had been collecting those since he started killing Instrumentalities. Better find out if there was one of those here.

Asgrimmur and Copper both yelled and waved as she headed downhill. She did not have to pretend she did not hear them.

The explosion had not consumed the Instrumentality completely. Slime and chunks of rotten “lard” were everywhere, including on the water of the Ormo Strait. The stench was brutal. But there was no more sense of a divine presence. The opposite was true. There was a vacuum, an impression that something important had gone missing. Heris felt an abiding sorrow that was not at all natural.

She spied the egg. It was bigger than any Piper