Dartun suddenly lowered his head and closed his eyes. She heard a faint drone coming from him. Without looking up, Dartun reached out to grab the chains in Telov’s hands, chains that at this frequency of energy should have given him such a shock as to send him unconscious.
There came an electrical snap: energy was being forced back through the chains into the neutral handles — and Telov’s hands began to burn. He screamed, couldn’t let go, fell to his knees still gripping the heated handles, crying while smoke streamed from his palms.
Papus quickly activated the Skammr and the chains were jammed and deactivated, and ancient energy, in the form of purple light, dissipated. Telov collapsed to his side and buried his hands into the snow.
She was stunned: how, without any relics, was Dartun able to do that?
Dartun spread his stance and, with his arms either side, his glance calm, took in the situation. Once again he faced Papus and smiled. ‘Sure you can handle me?’
‘How did you do that?’ she demanded. ‘You aren’t carrying any relics.’
‘I’m not who I used to be,’ Dartun replied.
The Skammr should have worn off by now. She gave the signal and four of her cultists ran forwards with relics: an electrical net spurted slickly into the air, and with a liquid grace fell onto Dartun — but he simply ripped through it with his bare hands.
How is that possible?
Two others tried to use weapons to beat him, one a sword, another a crossbow: miraculously, with a quick gesture of his right hand he managed to bend the metal of the sword so that it had become inert, and the crossbow bolt he caught with his left hand; doubly impressive because he wasn’t even looking in that direction.
Dartun flipped back his cloak and peeled away the skin on his arm: where she expected blood to surge and tendons to be exposed, a strange, almost white ceramic arm was in place, and it glittered with tiny webs of light.
More of her order charged, relics in hand.
The arm was a revolution in technology. It stuttered into life, vibrating minutely, one minute quite inflexible, the next very fluid. His face was set in a savage sneer as one by one he ripped into her order. She watched the violence in awe.
He jumped and bent back and forth with impossible flexibility. There was so much blood and ice spraying, and he moved so quickly, it was hard to discern the action, but she saw him cleave one of her members in two, sever another’s head sending it skittering across the frozen lake.
She was agog. Mortified.
Soon she was the only member of her order left standing, and Papus was stunned at the carnage around her. Tears filled her eyes as she regarded her whole cult wiped out with so much ease. Dartun was hardly tired by the spectacle, panting lightly, his breath clouding the air.
He stood to regard her, basking in the aftermath. His arm shimmered as the sun broke through, washing the scene with a pink light.
‘You’re… you’re not even human,’ Papus managed to say. She felt her stomach churning.
Oddly, her words seemed to knock him back, and he shook his head as if in a half-daze. He suddenly stared at her like he didn’t know what he’d been doing.
Papus took this moment of respite to survey the wreckage of her order, her life. Blood covered the narrow region of the lake. Body segments were scattered and heaped where two or more had fallen on each other under Dartun’s swift blows.
She would not let herself die in the same way. She would, at least, honour her order. As Dartun scanned the scene seemingly as confused by his work as she was, Papus primed all the relics beneath her furs, shivering with shock. She produced an Aldartal, triggered it Time froze rigid: nothing moved at the periphery of the scene, everything stopped. Except for Dartun, who sluggishly pulled himself free of the relic’s energy, slowly — as if covered in some abstract treacle — and stuttered into a state of normal time.
‘How…? How did you do that?’ Papus asked. Her fears were assuaged by her all-consuming desire to understand what he was.
‘You’ll have to try harder than that,’ he muttered. There was an air of insouciance about the manner in which he moved, as if he had all the time in the world to kill her. She deactivated the Aldartal and — the wind groaned once again, her hair spiralled before her face, and they were back in normal time.
‘Enough of this.’ Dartun lifted his surreal arm.
She turned to flee. He marched after her, and she sprinted across the ice to escape him. Frantically, in her pocket she activated a Deyja for a cloak of invisibility. A purple flash — like sheet lightning — and she was gone.
They paused for a moment, uncertain of how to proceed. Dartun tipped his head this way and that, as if trying to listen.
Even if, despite his new-found powers, he couldn’t see her, out here it was pointless — he would easily be able to observe her indentations in the snow, her frantic scrabbling across the white surface, the scuff-marks on the ice.
And as soon as she shifted even slightly, he clocked her.
Dartun continued his pursuit, his arm a gleaming white stammer of vibrations.
Something Brenna-based next, two small solid aluminium balls that she plucked from her pockets, activated, then rolled back towards Dartun. They skittered across the ice into his path and, as he stepped around one, they both exploded, aggressively spurting up fire and tiny, razor-sharp chunks of metal.
A short scream: At least he’s vaguely human, she thought.
Dartun stopped and flinched, as the fire ravaged his clothing. The shrapnel had shredded the skin across his face, and now, blood-streaked, he collapsed to his knees — finally! She heaved a sigh and, crawling on all fours and still invisible, she sagged tentative relief. Now to finish this off.
Papus slipped out a dagger from her boot and stood up. She walked over to him and prepared to stab his kneeling form in the back of the neck. Suddenly he lunged up at her, his face a snarling bloodied mess. He grabbed her by the throat with his human hand. She tried to slice at it, but the other arm punched her stomach And punctured it.
Stunned, a burning pain surged through Papus’s body — and she could see her own blood flowing like wine along Dartun’s arm, down into the little nooks and crannies in the surface. Dartun was elbow-deep inside her abdomen.
She stared into his eyes and saw something mechanical behind his glare, like a subtle functioning of relics. Then he must have clutched something inside her — oh, fuck could she feel it — and he tugged hard. Her own innards were yanked out before her eyes, flecks of her blood peppering the air.
Papus collapsed, her head striking the ice.
*
Verain experienced a state of being both relieved and appalled as Dartun returned covered in blood. What horrors she had witnessed she had observed from a distance, and the details were unclear. She knew there had been a slaughter, however — that much was obvious.
After the butchering of the final cultist, Dartun had remained there for several minutes, patrolling up and down the devastation, and she wondered what he must have been thinking. The remains were gruesome, like the despicable culling of seals that many of the tribes across the Archipelago performed each year. She could not take her eyes off the scene, even as Dartun made his way back through the thick snow, to reach the remnants of the Order of the Equinox.
‘I have dealt with the matter accordingly,’ Dartun announced.
‘You don’t say,’ Tuung blurted out from behind her.
‘Your face…’ Verain began. His skin was gently pockmarked, like a volcanic rock.
Dartun reached up his hand to sense the details, and seemed unmoved. ‘It’ll be back to normal soon enough — a side effect against one of her relics.’