Fiction:Tenet/History/26

= The Cunning Man, II =

Anungim speaks a word. The word is a mnemonic, a trigger phrase that briefly orders his mind into a structure of power, a structure to temporarily override reality. The word is zephyr. A hot wind begins to whip around Anungim's legs. He embraces it, lets it suffuse him, and rises into the air.

He leaves behind the sights and sounds and smells of war -- a few desultory arrows fly in his general direction, but fall far short. He ignores them. He casts his senses outward, a psychic gaze that sees far more than sight ever could, looking for a pocket of absence, a pocket of void.

There. Towards the back of the Xanidactae lines, moving amongst the reserves. It's him. At the sight of him, the god riding Anungim's mind stirs, saying:

--Kill him, Anungim. He is an abomination.

-Of course, lord Bephret.

Anungim hurtles through the air, riding the wind. The war beneath him blurs, Tenet and Xanidactae becoming one indistinct smear of violence. His target is a person-shaped spot of blindness that his psychic sight can't penetrate, a wizened shape much unlike the muscular avorn that surround him. An honor guard? They are armored ornately enough for it, and they carry trinkets that to Anungim's eyes shine with holy power. He'll have to cut through them to get to his enemy. Fine by him.

Anungim descends like a swooping bird of prey. His wings are axe and sword, held out wide to his right and his left. When he hits them, he hits them like a sack of razor blades.

Spell-forged bronze meets carbon steel and shreds it like paper. Anungim rips his way through the ranks of the Xanidactae elite. With a thought he casts his shield of whirling blades outwards and reduces their first ranks to bloody gristle -- he is bounding through the blood spray before they've all even hit the ground, axe and sword raised and ready. His khopesh sweeps down and meets the upraised sword of a Xanidactae guardsman and shears through both it and half of the unfortunate man's head. His long-axe darts outward and hooks a second soldier off his feet -- as he pulls it back he loops it around in a circle and splits the guardsman's ribcage open. The others are on him now, stabbing at him with spears and short swords -- Anungim laughs, parrying, dodging, trying to hit him is like trying to hit mist, only mist doesn't respond by stabbing you in the gut and then through the neck when you bend over in pain, or by carving you open from navel to clavicle with a single swing of its axe, or by speaking a word that causes your lungs to fill up with blood so that you choke and drown in it.

Anungim cackles. He lobs a palm-sized glass sphere into the air to his left, where it shatters against a guardsman's shield and erupts into a cloud of poisonous black smoke. His blades have returned to him now, and he ignores the choking and wet gurgling coming from the guardsmen enveloped by the cloud as he advances. He cuts down a last handful of Xanidactae soldiers -- their weak, hastily-crafted medallions no match for the countercharms chanted into his blades -- and then he comes face to face with the true enemy.

Anungim has killed about a hundred Xanidactae royal guardsmen in a little over fifteen seconds. Taboo has spent that time preparing his own offense.

A wave of nausea and cold washes over Anungim. He stumbles, his stride faltering, and on his chest and arms three of his savage talismans suddenly flare white-hot and shatter with tiny metallic /ping/s as they absorb the brunt of whatever bad-magic curse Taboo has just thrown his way. Then the nausea passes, and Anungim is upon him.

Anungim directs his blades forth -- a whizzing swarm of razors hurtle towards Taboo, who simply gestures with his four arms and stops the blades in midair. Then he makes a /cutting/ motion, and Anungim gasps with a sudden sense of loss, and the dozens of bronze triangles clatter to the ground, severed from Anungim's control. But Anungim is a Warsinger of the Ulugalzu Choir, and he is only fazed for a moment before he steps forward and tries to bury his axe in Taboo's insolent skull.

The long-axe meets a barrier of pure will. Cutting through it is like trying to cut through tar. Anungim pulls it back and, like a pendulum, swings his khopesh upward -- but this, too, meets a wall of invisible force.

"Slave of Nurgath," growls Taboo. "I will not allow you to corrupt these people."

"You should've stayed in the past, old man," retorts Anungim, because Taboo is /old/, so ancient he's atavistic, so ancient he still needs /eyes/ to see. "Your time is over. Your time ended before I was born."

This is empty bravado. It's empty because Taboo is nightmarishly powerful, as powerful as a Saint, and Anungim is terrified of meeting him will-to-will because that's a fight he knows he won't win. Adrumalesh once contended with him, Anungim knows, but Adrumalesh had the help of a psychic amplifier constructed from the minds of a thousand lesser talents -- and even then, he wonders if Taboo fled deliberately, seeking a stronger position among the Xanidactae.

But though Taboo's will is unwholesomely powerful, he has nothing like a Warsinger's physical lethality. The plan hinges on that fact. So Anungim bares his two rows of teeth and presses his attack. Green light dances on the blades of his axe and his sword -- his every swing becomes an arc of sickly flame, every blow illuminated. And all the while his god is screaming in his head KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM --

/Keep up the attack. Don't give him any room to concentrate or focus, because if he does, if you let him attack a second time, he will wipe you off the face of this planet. Distract him while Adrumalesh prepares the true strike./

The ferocity of Anungim's attack is driving Taboo backwards even though none of his blows are meeting their mark. Taboo raises barriers of will to arrest them, or diverts them with a flick of his hand, but this is a good thing, it means Taboo's attention is occupied with defending himself. Make sure his hands are occupied, he's a tactile caster--

But suddenly Taboo is striding forward, and a hammerblow of willpower smashes into Anungim and sends his khopesh spinning out of his hand. He barely has enough time to raise a psychic barrier before a second wave of power smashes into it, stronger than the first, taking his axe with it as it passes.

-Adrumalesh. Hurry.

~Quiet. I am concentrating.

"Your time should never have begun," says Taboo. He raises two hands level with his head, two outstretched to either side, preparing to cast. Anungim can feel the power gathering -- it sets his teeth on edge. "I am the only true Chanter left. The rest of you are puppets, chained to monsters you call gods."

No time, no weapons, no nothing. So in mad desperation Anungim hurls himself bodily at Taboo.

Taboo isn't expecting this. He's lowered his defenses to attack. Anungim tackles him, and Taboo staggers backwards beneath his weight, all his focus gone. They grapple. Anungim elbows Taboo in the stomach and receives a tooth-rattling blow to the jaw in return. He spits in Taboo's eye, and gets a gratifying hiss of pain as Taboo breaks loose, clutching at his face.

"You think your power is all yours?" snarls Anungim. From his belt he draws a brutal bronze spike. "We serve willingly. You're a slave who thinks he's free!"

Taboo is distracted, his attention shot -- it has to be now. Anungim leaps at the ancient Chanter and stabs it into his chest.

Taboo grunts in pain. His hands close around the spike, but arcane mechanisms are already turning and activating within it. Anungim darts backwards and shields himself with his arms, because suddenly there's a flash of heat and Taboo becomes a pillar of green fire.

A mage-killer, the same type of weapon Anungim used to kill his old rival. He pants, watching Taboo flail and scream as the fire consumes him, a fire that feeds on life instead of air.

Anungim reaches behind him, and his long-axe flies joyfully back into his hand. He's under no illusion that the life-eater fire will actually kill something as old and awful as Taboo, nor that striking him down with an axe will put him away permanently, but it's best to cripple him before Adrumalesh makes his move.

Anungim walks forward. He braces his feet, angling the long-axe for a decapitating blow, and swings.

And the green fire suddenly goes black and cold, and a skeletal hand defleshed by fire reaches out and catches the haft of his axe.

The fire dies down -- it becomes him. Taboo wears it like a cloak, it pulls away from him and becomes him, revealing the awful scorched meat of his body, coming off of him in charred strips to reveal the blackened skeleton beneath. His skull is blackened, his teeth are blackened, his jaw is held on only with ligaments, his eyes are burst and runny but behind them the sockets are filled with hatred and cold white light.

Fire-twisted hands reach out and seize Anungim. They grab his axe, they grab his arms, they grab the crest of his head and hook fingers into his jaw, there are six, ten, twelve of them, they grab his legs and feet, lifting him into the air. Taboo is swelling up and rising up, black fire becoming like holes into space, filled with a light like stars. He is becoming something not like a Chanter at all, and he is pulling at Anungim's limbs, trying to pull him apart like an insect, and Anungim is screaming in his head --

-Adrumalesh! Bephret! Help me! Help me!

And Adrumalesh says:

~It is done.

And Adrumalesh says:

~Farewell, Anungim. You were going to die, anyways.

And Anungim hears a sound like ripping above him. Taboo hears it too, and both cast their sight upward to see the sky unrolling above them like a scroll, and a sea of roiling energy pouring down from the breach. And Anungim, even as he is being torn apart by the thing his kindred have rightly named Taboo, has enough time to think

-Adrumalesh, you utter bastard --

before everything goes white.