and headed back toward the witch. She hoped to find a relatively safe nook for Cree but if she couldn’t, the girl would have to stay with her. At least Rune could protect her from legislators.
Damascus bared her teeth in a furious, half-mad grin, and despite her power, part of Rune melted into a puddle of terror.
But only for a second.
The air was nearly too thick with sheets of blood to see clearly, too loud with screams of pain to hear, and too alive with horror to fear anything else.
But Damascus was something to fear.
Mother Skyll might be her match, but Rune knew the battle could be lost.
Despite the tales, despite the faith.
They could lose to the fucking witch.
The Rune zombies were there, a few dozen of them, and they fought and killed with cold faces and dead eyes. They worked their way to Rune and surrounded her in a wide circle of protection.
The witch’s monsters and men continued fighting—killing, really—but as long as they didn’t approach Rune, the zombies did nothing but wait.
Her guards.
Oh shit.
Don’t allow fear to control you. This is—
Yeah, yeah. My fucking destiny, I know. But she still scares the fuck out of me.
Damascus didn’t resemble anything remotely human.
A mass swirled around her, and Rune knew it held the trapped souls, caught in a sticky web of magic and madness. The witch had become a long ropy mixture of shit and blood and mucus, held together with strings of black evil and grinning doom.
The earth trembled beneath Rune’s feet.
“Rune,” the witch called, her voice cutting through the battle sounds like a power saw, “I never wanted you as a daughter. I wanted to rip the monstrous bitch from you and squeeze the life from her. I wanted to take her power and add it with mine. Why,” she said, sounding almost reasonable, “we could have had everything. Now, I will have it all and I’m not sharing.”
Rune said nothing and clenched her teeth together to keep them still.
“Look,” the witch called, almost playfully. “Look behind you. Look around you.”
Her armies had grown. They stomped from the hills, from around the moors, from the outer lands.
They were many. So many.
Cree had disappeared.
Kill the witch.
The rest will take care of itself.
And as Rune climbed the steep hill of bleached bones, she heard a sound like a trumpet and glanced over her shoulder.
Flesh came.
Brasque Dray’s army was joining the fight. They no longer hid behind unbreakable walls, but rode in on hundreds of armored horses to add their fighting skills to the downfall of the witch.
“You’ve always known you were going to die by my hand, witch. That time has come.” Her voice was hoarse and little more than a whisper.
Still, Damascus heard her, even from her perch atop the beast on the hill. Rune’s words flew to her as though they’d been ordered to do so.
As perhaps they had.
The witch raised her voice and it boomed like thunder, freezing the fighters in their tracks. They stared up at her, blades and fists frozen in midair, as she screamed.
“Kill,” she ordered. “Die! Lose your worthless selves in the madness that swirls inside.”
They broke out once more into a frenzy of killing.
Rune raced for the witch.
“If you defeat me,” the witch called, “there will be no one left to care.”
She giggled then, and it was the scariest, maddest sound Rune had ever heard.
“I’m waiting,” Damascus called. “I’m waiting for both of you.”
And the faster Rune climbed, the taller the hill became.
She grabbed handholds in the piles of white bone. Her boots sent loose debris tumbling from the pile to the ground below.
The hill of bones grew, and grew, and grew.
Then the beast reared up, screaming, and turned to carry the witch away.
“No,” Rune screamed, fighting her way up the hill. “Don’t you run, you fucking coward.”
“The rebels,” someone yelled. “They’re coming!”
On horseback and beastback, rebel groups sped over the barren land, answering the call of the battle. Their own battle cries races before them, heralding their arrival.
And they weren’t small groups.
Some of the witch’s fighters broke off and ran to meet them.
The whole world was a war zone, and it was overwhelming.
Rune clung to the hill of bones and stared out from her high vantage point. Warriors covered the ground for what seemed like miles as more people, groups, and fighters joined the battle.
She couldn’t find Z or the berserker or Lex in the moving mass of people, but couldn’t let herself think they might have lost their fight.